REGNO UNITO, FRANCIA, BELGIO
2016 – DCP – colore – 100’

Direction: Ken Loach

Screenplay: Paul Laverty

Cinematography: Robbie Ryan

Editing: Jonathan Morris

Set design: Linda Wilson

Music: George Fenton

Costumes: Joanne Slater

Cast: Dave Johns (Daniel Blake), Hayley Squires (Katie), Dylan McKiernan (Dylan), Briana Shann (Daisy), Kema Sikazwe (China), Sharon Percy (Sheila), Micky McGregor (Ivan)

Producers: Rebecca O’Brien

Production: Sixteen Films, Why Not, Wild Bunch

SINOPSIS

Fifty-nine-year-old Daniel Blake from Newcastle has been a carpenter all his life. However, for the first time in his life, he needs help from the State. Daniel meets Katie, a single mother with two young children, Daisy and Dylan. For Katie, her only chance to escape living in a room at a homeless shelter in London is to accept an apartment in a city she doesn’t know, 500 kilometres from London. Daniel and Katie find themselves in a no-man’s-land, trapped in a suffocating bureaucratic system that characterizes the English social system. Underlying all of this is the typical rhetoric of contemporary England, which consequently divides the population into those who work hard and those who exploit state benefits to avoid working.

Critical Note

“Ken Loach has always put his knack for comedy to work even in his most polemical films. From skewering the pomposity of authority figures, to expressing the natural exuberance of people who weren’t always worn down by struggle, to conjuring French footballers in council estates, Loach shows the value of disarming an audience with laughter. With I, Daniel Blake, his latest film and one of his finest, Loach’s talent for humour runs through the entire work. Here austerity politics is rendered both absurd and abusive in what the title character calls a “monumental farce”, which might be funny if it weren’t true.” (Pamela Hutchinson, Sight & Sound, V. 26 n. 11, November 2016)

PREMI E FESTIVAL

2016 Cannes Film Festival – Competition:Golden Palm, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury
2016 Locarno IFF – Piazza Grande:  Audience Award
2016 San Sebastián IFF:Audience Award
2016 European Film Awards: European University Film Award
2017 BAFTA Film Awards: Outstanding British Film of the Year

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