Ken Loach won his second Palme d’Or – the festival’s highest honour – for I, Daniel Blake, a social-realist drama about a disabled carpenter struggling with. Ken Loach's 'I, Daniel Blake,' about an ailing carpenter who fights to stay on welfare, is a film of moving relevance. Long synopsis : Daniel Blake (59) has worked as a joiner most of his life in Newcastle. Now, for the first time ever, he needs help from the State. I, Daniel Blake review: Ken Loach's welfare state polemic is blunt, dignified and brutally moving . Based on research and interviews by the screenwriter Paul Laverty, this movie tells the fictional story of Daniel Blake, a middle- aged widower in the North East who can. The film is not objective, and perhaps Loach and Laverty have signed up to Churchill. Many are happy to concede the value of films like this set in the developing world, showing sympathetic people trying to retain their dignity while being hungry. But the same thing set in modern Britain gets dismissed with an embarrassed shrug as strident or hectoring, as if going hungry is impossible for British non- shirkers. I, Daniel Blake marks yet another well-told chapter in director Ken Loach's powerfully populist filmography. I, Daniel Blake is indeed flawed, I would concede. There are a couple of very big scenes, probably too big, and I saw the ending coming 2. It would be wrong to label his style austerity, of course. But it has passion and directness and idealism, and very good, unactorly performances from standup comic Dave Johns as Daniel Blake and Hayley Squires as Katie, the single mother from London who is relocated to a council flat in Newcastle, with its cheaper cost of living. From the very first, Blake is in a perfect storm of bureaucratic misery. He has survived a cardiac arrest, and is told to rest up by his NHS consultant, and not to attempt any more piece- work as a carpenter. But catastrophically, he presents as being quite well; he does not have the wit or cunning to give officialdom the most pessimistic possible account of his infirmity, and in fact instinctively puts the best face on things. A box- ticking assessment from a functionary at the Department for Work and Pensions decides that he is not entitled to sickness benefit. Meet the real Daniel Blakes. The ensuing Catch- 2. The new film by British filmmaker Ken Loach, I Daniel Blake won the Palme d'Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Daniel Blake (59) has worked as a joiner. I, Daniel Blake is a 2016 British-French drama film directed by Ken Loach and written by Loach's frequent collaborator Paul Laverty. Everything has to be applied for online, but Blake has no computer, no smartphone, no internet, and is mortifyingly incompetent at using the terminals in his public library, which crash or freeze just as he is reaching the end of the form, so he must go back to the beginning. His one friend is Katie, the quick- tempered single mother whom Daniel befriends, becoming a gentle, grandfatherly figure to her two kids Though he is as innocent as a child when it comes to the web, he shows he can fix up their dilapidated flat, and give them savvy tips on keeping it as warm as possible. He does actually like doing work. The cold, hard grimness of the Jobcentre, with its flat lighting and painted chipboard- partitioned cubicles, puts a brutal glaze on many scenes. So also does the language. The officials have a chilling habit of defusing all complaint, whether face- to- face or on the phone, by insisting that they themselves are not making a ruling . The scene is a brutal, tactless evocation of what unthinkable things hunger might do. Dickens wrote in Bleak House that . This film intervenes in the messy, ugly world of poverty with the secular intention of making us see that it really is happening, and in a prosperous nation, too. I, Daniel Blake is a movie with a fierce, simple dignity of its own.
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