I, Daniel Blake
Daniel Blake, 59, has worked as a joiner most of his life in Newcastle. Now, after a heart attack and nearly falling from a scaffold, he needs help from the State for the first time in his life.
He crosses paths with a single mother Katie and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. Katie’s only chance to escape a one-roomed homeless hostel in London has been to accept a flat in a city she doesn’t know some 300 miles away.
Daniel and Katie find themselves in 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. (Festival information)
Sustained by the great artistic qualities of the director, this movie portrays a man at the end of his life, who puts his own suffering aside to be of service to a family challenged by marginalization and poverty. Like a Good Samaritan, he brings them the attention and affection that are as necessary to human beings as material needs.