Film: I, Daniel Blake

After a heart attack, carpenter and widower Daniel Blake is too weak to go back to work. He clearly has a right to government benefits, but they are denied him and he sinks deeper and deeper into poverty.

His descent is all the worse because he is a good man who spontaneously tries to help a young mother who can hardly feed her two children. At eighty years old, Ken Loach has made another searing indictment of a country that thinks food banks are perfectly normal and intentionally cuts holes in the social safety net so as not to have to help people. His political attack and occasional oversimplifications have made some journalists wonder whether his second Golden Palm was really deserved. They forget, however, that Loach's legitimate indignation is again embedded in a simple, plausible story that goes straight to your heart. You need not share his political convictions to value his storytelling and phenomenal direction. There is no shame in getting swept away.

I, Daniel Blake
UK, FR, BE, 2016, dir.: Ken Loach, act.: Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, 100 min