I, Daniel Blake

I, Daniel Blake (2016) is about a joiner recovering from a heart attack trying to claim benefits. Daniel is fifty nine and a tradesman in Newcastle. His doctor has told him he cannot work. He applies for sickness support and is refused: the assessor on the phone asks whether he can raise his arm to a certain height, never asks about his heart, and he does not score enough points. To appeal he must first claim jobseeker's allowance. To get that he must prove he is looking for work, so a man forbidden to work has to look for work. Every application is made online and he does not know how to use a computer. What the film shows is not a person but a mechanism. No official is malicious; each is filling in the boxes on their own screen, and the system as a whole eliminates the human being. The second strand is Katie, a mother of two moved out of London because there is no housing for her there. There is a scene in a food bank. She opens a tin and eats standing there. It was shot in one take; the actor had not done it in rehearsal and the reaction is real. Ken Loach made it at eighty, having come out of retirement. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, his second. Paul Laverty wrote it out of interviews about real cases. It started a political argument in Britain about how the benefits system operates. It runs 100 minutes. Good for: social realism, British cinema, and Ken Loach. Less good for: there is no hope in it, the ending is hard, and the film openly argues a case.