Film
I Daniel Blake
Ken Loach’s triumphant Palme d’Or-winning impassioned welfare state drama, made in Newcastle, is a vital film for our times.The film stars local stand-up comedian Dave Johns as Daniel Blake, a middle-aged widower, who after working his whole life in Newcastle as a joiner finds himself in need of help from the state following a near-fatal heart attack.His path crosses with Katie, a single mother and her two young children who have been forced to move up north from London to escape a one-roomed homeless hostel. Daniel and Katie find themselves in a no-man's land, caught on the barbed wire of welfare bureaucracy as played out against the rhetoric of 'striver and skiver' in modern day Britain.