Harry Robertson

The Cambridge Film Festival (Google it, and go along to some of the great films they’re showing) began its exciting two weeks of proceedings on Thursday evening with Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner I, Daniel Blake, an incredibly moving tale of a man’s struggle with a faceless bureaucratic machine intent on treating him as a ‘service user’ or ‘scrounger’ rather than as a person.

Having suffered a heart attack, the titular 59-year-old Newcastle carpenter (Dave Johns) is told by doctors that he mustn’t return to work, yet in the opening scenes we see him receive a call from the benefits centre informing him that he is no longer eligible for the employment and support allowance that, as an ill man out of a job, he relies on to live. He failed to score the required 15 points in the humiliating government eligibility test, and as such is forced to look for non-existent jobs while appealing the decision through a Kafkaesque system of unreturned calls and perpetually postponed hearing dates.

On a different journey through the same system is single mother and native Londoner, Katie (Hayley Squires), who has just been allocated a council house in Newcastle for her and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. Her experience is equally as desperate and degrading. The benefits she needs to keep her and her children afloat have been frozen after she was ‘sanctioned’ for being late to a meeting (which she couldn’t help). She desperately, and passionately, appeals, but it’s to no avail: the system has its rules, and as such she’ll be penalised, won’t have electricity in her house, and will have to use an oversubscribed food bank until they’re reinstated.

In this hopeless situation she begins a friendship with Daniel based on mutual help, whose sympathy spurs him to do what he can to help Katie out, fixing up her house and striking up a  relationship with her children to whom he pays the attention they’ve been so sorely missing.

Loach’s brutal realism is humbling and shaming as these characters, so full in their other roles as mothers, students, friends, football fans, and craftsmen, are stripped of their humanity and offered no recourse to claim it back. Throughout the film, extremely powerful scenes document the depths to which people in these communities have been pushed. Loach trains his eye on what David Cameron liked to call ‘Broken Britain’, and rages against the ethos that he thinks broke it, as well as against a society in which compassion and kindness are subjugated in favour of efficiency and profits.

Paul Laverty’s script is brilliant. The dialogue provides truly soulful human interactions and glints of humour – a source of heart in this heartless world – and an emotional gut-punch of a final monologue from Katie that left the audience stunned and teary-eyed. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan finds beauty in the everyday, as he does too in the Newcastle cityscapes which provide a welcome break from the increasingly overwrought Hollywood sets of other recent films. Outstanding performances from the two leads allow the film to put its message across all the more powerfully.

At a place like Cambridge, you could be forgiven for thinking that the story told in I, Daniel Blake is an exceptional one. But the power of the film lies not in a narrative of how scarily things can go wrong, but in how scarily things are going wrong. In truth, using words like ‘Kafkaesque’ to describe Loach’s film is giving in to cliché, and belies what gives it its unflinchingly powerful message: Kafka is fiction whereas this is reality, and a reality that’s affecting millions.

Here, Loach is more like that other great 20th-century writer, George Orwell, in the simplicity of his story and its message of the importance of decency and dignity in the face of dehumanising forces. I, Daniel Blake is part-Down and Out and part-1984, updated for the 21st century and given a handful more hope. If you go to see one film this year, it should be this.

Sarah Hill

Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winning film was the headliner of the first night of the 36th Cambridge Film Festival, and opened to a packed cinema in front of its star, Dave Johns. With a background in stand-up comedy, Johns pushes himself into very different territory here, giving a convincing performance as the eponymous Daniel Blake, a carpenter by trade signed off work by his doctor after a heart attack and subjected to an illogical and degrading minefield of fit-to-work assessments, CV clinics and online employment support applications.

The crux of the film is the friendship that develops between Daniel and Katie, a single mother newly arrived to a council flat in Newcastle after being relocated from London, who is forced to make ever more brutal sacrifices in order to provide for her children. Loach focuses on the decency and the humanity of these characters. He is at pains to debunk the myth of benefits scroungers, insisting heavily on Daniel and Katie’s desire to work. While this does occasionally feel slightly over-played, Loach shows a masterful ability to present his characters as victims of a system without patronisation: while we may not have been in their situation, we can identify with their decisions, portrayed from a human perspective, as they make the natural turn to state support after circumstances conspire against them.

In doing so, they are faced with a system which refuses to see past its own circuitous jargon and protocol, trapped in a near-Orwellian dystopia of ‘decision makers’ and ‘fit to work schemes’. The de-humanising world of the job centre is compounded by the mechanical phone help lines and online application forms. This world is all the more chilling because the film has a strong documentary-like aspect: the woman playing a volunteer at a local food bank really does work there. These characters are not exceptions but exemplars. The film packs an emotional punch, but not in a gratuitous way: the cinematography is stark and the only music is the lonely tune Daniel listens to that precedes Radio 4’s shipping forecast. 

Loach’s political commitment and passion for his subject is clear, but his criticism is effected from a human level: we never see more of the system than Daniel, exposed to its bewildering and toxic incongruences through his eyes. We don’t need a voiceover or statistics to explain that the problems faced by Daniel and Katie reach far beyond them – the queue at the foodbank alone tells us that.

It is a desperately bleak portrayal of modern Britain that Loach offers, but one that demands to be seen