Review I, Daniel Blake


BY HAJERA BLAGG


Flickers of hope in dark times


Hajera Blagg speaks to I, Daniel Blake star, Dave Johns


A “joyous, funny and moving portrait of man” is how one reviewer called Ken Loach’s latest film, I, Daniel Blake.


At the heart of this portrait is the film’s title character, Daniel Blake, a 59-year-old joiner who, suddenly too ill to work, enters the bureaucratic heartlessness of the UK’s benefits system.


It is stand-up comedian Dave Johns first feature film – there’s even talk of a possible Oscar nomination.


“Before I got involved with this film, I had no idea that benefits sanctions existed. The idea you could lose your benefits for weeks if you’re one minute late to a Jobcentre appointment – this happens to people all the time now – I was absolutely horrified.”


Before filming started Ken Loach asked Dave to fill out the 52 page form needed to sign on to Employment Support Allowance for workers too ill or disabled to work. He was unable to complete it.


“I came back to him and said, ‘I tried but I just couldn’t do it.’ It’s completely insane.”


Dave notes the government’s austerity agenda has transformed the way people see and understand themselves and their neighbours.


“Under this system of benefits sanctions, with the stroke of a pen, anyone who signs on is immediately labelled a ‘scrounger’ – and this then sets the working class against each other, thinking, ‘Well, I’m working and they’re just lazy, why should I help them?


30 uniteWORKS Autumn 2016


I, Daniel Blake is in many ways a grim film that reflects the grim reality of our modern benefits system – which often has fatal consequences. But amid this darkness, is there any hope?


“Of course there’s hope – without hope we’re done for,” he replies.


Dave sees hope in the way many young people have become deeply engaged in politics. He sees it too in the ordinary people he’s met who run food banks out of a deep sense of conviction that they’ve had enough of the way things are.


Film viewers will see that same flicker of hope in the friendship between Dave’s character Blake and Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother also caught in the benefits system’s web. This friendship represents what he believes the working-class must claim back if we want the system to change – a renewed sense of community.


“We need to reclaim the idea there’s power in collective participation – through unions, through our local communities, through political action.”


And it’s this bigger picture that Dave hopes others will understand after seeing the film – a bigger picture that all starts with one person’s story.


It’s a story that we are just one step away – an accident, an illness, a job loss – from it becoming our own story too, Dave notes. In this sense, we are all Daniel Blake.


I, Daniel Blake is now out on general release Find out more HERE


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