2016 ( UK | France | Belgium ) ( Drama )
Starring: Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Sharon Percy
DIRECTOR: Ken Loach
Fifty years after the incandescent Cathy Come Home, Ken Loach’s ‘I, Daniel Blake’, winner of the 2016 Palme d’Or at Cannes, also concentrates on a life determinedly crushed by economic circumstances. Stand-up comedian Dave Johns is warm and skilful as widower Dan, a 59-year-old joiner recovering from a heart operation in his housing estate in the north-east of England. Essentially buoyant, Dan has been a grafter since his teens, and has never had to negotiate the UK benefits system. But now he faces homelessness, simply because he can’t work out how to fill in the various and deliberately too-complex online forms. Half bemused by bureaucratic indifference, half-wretched, Dan sees his circumstances worsen.
Ken Loach has crafted a Cathy Come Home for the 21st century, the raw anger of which resonates long after you leave the cinema.
(1hr 40min)