Cannes 2016: I, Daniel Blake, film review – Ken Loach's agitprop packs real punch

This is sure to be Jeremy Corbyn's favourite ever film, says David Sexton
Destroyed by the system: I, Daniel Blake
David Sexton13 May 2016

Ken Loach, 79, has long been a festival favourite and I, Daniel Blake is a corker of social-realist agitprop, choicely filmed by Robbie Ryan.

Dan (Dave Johns), a Geordie joiner, childless and a widower, has had a heart attack at 59 and, told by his doctors he is not fit to go back to work, struggles with the benefits system, getting neither jobseeker’s allowance, nor, under the sadistic, Kafkaesque new rules, disability allowance, especially now it’s all “digital by default”.

At the Jobcentre Plus, he meets young single mum Katie (Hayley Squires) and her two kids, freshly arrived in Newcastle after two years banged up in a single room in a homeless hostel in London — “they’re moving out the likes of me” — and helps them, fixing up their new home and accompanying them to the food bank, where Katie is so ravenous she eats from a tin with her hands.

Her only choice is to go on the game, while he has to sell his furniture. Inevitably, the system destroys sweetheart Dan, and we know that his benefits appeal is not going to go well, despite Katie’s support.

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At his pauper’s funeral, Katie reads out what he would have said in his own defence: “I’m a man, not a dog... I, Daniel Blake, am a citizen, nothing more, nothing less.” Subtitled in English here for those not from Tyneside, I, Daniel Blake could usefully be shown on continuous loop to those would-be immigrants who persist in viewing this country as a land of Cockaigne. When Jeremy Corbyn catches it, it will be his favourite film ever.

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