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I, Daniel Blake(2017)
IFC Films- R
- 1h 40m
Jun 2, 2017 | Limited
After surviving a heart-attack, a 59-year-old carpenter must fight bureaucratic forces to receive Employment and Support Allowance.
Releases
Original Release | Jun 2, 2017
Box Office
Results
$18,682
$260,354
$15,437,345
$15,697,699
Director & Top Cast
Technical Specifications
Sound Mix: Dolby Digital
Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1
Other Details
Country of Origin: United Kingdom,France,Belgium
Language: English
Showtimes
Your Location or
(U.S. Only)
Summaries
Plot Summary
- Widower Daniel Blake (Dave Johns), a 59-year-old living in Newcastle, has had a heart attack at work. Daniel was a carpenter before the heart attack. Though his cardiologist has not allowed him to return to work, Daniel is deemed fit to do so after a work capability assessment and denied employment and support allowance. The person conducting the assessment is not a medical professional, but just a person asking a bunch of questions and recording the answers without really understanding what the answers mean or imply. It is implied that Employment and support services have been outsourced by the Government to a private agency, who has created a process to deal with applicants, but has completely lost out on the human touch. Calls to their service center have long wait times (even up to 1 hour 48 minutes) and are charged.Daniel is frustrated to learn that his doctor was not contacted about the decision (the doctor continues to tell Daniel that he needs to work on improving the fitness of his heart, failing which they will need to install a defibrillator), and applies for an appeal, a process he finds difficult because he must complete a set of forms on the web and is not computer literate.Daniel befriends single mother Katie (Hayley Squires) after she is sanctioned for arriving late for a job Centre appointment. Katie and her children have just moved to Newcastle from a London homeless persons' hostel, as there is no affordable accommodation available in London. Daniel helps the family by repairing objects, teaching them how to heat rooms without electricity and crafting wooden toys for the children.China (Kema Sikazwe) is Daniel's next-door neighbor and is an African American man. He is using Daniel's address to receive illegal runs of shoes of famous brands from their factory in China. China is selling those shoes at half the price of those in high street malls.Meanwhile Daniel is caught up in the welfare bureaucracy. After his application for employment benefits is denied, he is told to keep looking for work to get Jobseeker benefits. But his doctor has told him not to work. So, Daniel keeps handing out CVs, but also keeps rejecting job offers. Meanwhile, his appeal has not been accepted as it has to go through a mandatory re-consideration, which is without any time-limits.Furthermore, the agency is not satisfied that Daniel has spent sufficient time looking for work (with his handwritten CV and all), and thus puts him on a 4-week sanction of Job Seekers Allowance. The next sanction would be 13 weeks and thereafter a max of 3 years. Daniel decides not to seek a continuation of his Job Seeker allowance. A sympathetic agency worker Ann (Kate Rutter) begs him to consider that he could lose everything, but Daniel is firm.During a visit to a food bank, Katie is overcome by hunger and breaks down. After she is caught shoplifting at a supermarket, a security guard offers her work as an escort. Daniel surprises her at the brothel, where he begs her to give up the job, but she tearfully insists she has no other choice to feed her children.As a condition for receiving job-seeker's allowance, Daniel must keep looking for work. He refuses a job at a scrapyard because his doctor will not allow him to work yet. When Daniel's work coach tells him he must work harder at finding a job or be sanctioned, Daniel spray-paints "I, Daniel Blake, demand my appeal date before I starve" on the building. He earns the support of passersby, including other benefits claimants, but is arrested and given a warning by the police. Daniel sells most of his belongings and becomes a recluse but is pulled out of his depression by Katie's daughter, Daisy (Briana Shann), who brings him a homemade meal to repay Daniel for his kindness.On the day of Daniel's appeal, Katie accompanies him to court. A welfare adviser tells Daniel that his case looks sound. On glimpsing the judge and doctor who will decide his case, Daniel becomes anxious and visits the lavatory, where he suffers a heart attack and dies. At his public health funeral, Katie reads the eulogy, including the speech Daniel had intended to read at his appeal. The speech describes his feelings about how the welfare system failed him by treating him like a dog instead of a man proud to have paid his dues to society.
Storyline
- A 59 year old carpenter recovering from a heart attack befriends a single mother and her two kids as they navigate their way through the impersonal, Kafkaesque benefits system. With equal amounts of humor, warmth and despair, the journey is heartfelt and emotional until the end. Having recently suffered a major heart attack at work, Newcastle's 59-year-old widowed carpenter Daniel Blake has been ordered by his doctors to stay out of any vigorous action and rest, however, after a negative employment support assessment, he is deemed ineligible for compensation, not scoring enough points to obtain benefits. Without any income or a pension, desperate and frustrated from the endless, dead-end conversations over the phone with the impersonal government health-care agents, Daniel will visit the welfare office to make an appeal, only to face in person the draconian civil servants and to be consumed by a faceless system and its bureaucratic jargon. Against all odds, with perseverance and courage, Daniel Blake, as an original, modern working-class hero, he will boldly stand up for himself and for those in need, withstanding nobly the humiliation while reminding that, above all, we are human by default. — Nick Riganas Newcastle upon Tyne, England. On the very far side of middle age, widowed Daniel Blake, a construction worker specializing in fine carpentry work, is recuperating from a heart attack. Despite his GP and cardiologist's assessment that he is not yet fit enough to return to work, he is denied employment and support allowance based on the standardized criteria assessment by the government agency. With no savings and no personal support, he is relying on some sort of government financial assistance to help him through this time when he should not be working. As he tries to set in motion the appeals process for the employment and support allowance and as he tries to find any other government program for which he may even be remotely eligible to tie him through the short term until he is deemed healthy enough to return to work, he runs into one bureaucratic quagmire after another, each process seemingly designed to make people like him fail and give up. Through this time, he is enmeshed within the lives of two sets of people. The first is his young neighbor, China, and China's friend, Piper, who are trying to start a new business in today's global economy. The second is Katie Morgan, a single mother to adolescents Daisy and Dylan Morgan. The Morgans have just moved to Newcastle from London solely as that is where there was social housing available. Katie too has fallen into the bureaucratic runaround at social services. Regardless, Katie is determined to make a home for her two children despite her financial problems. Regardless of his own health and financial issues, the former which he doesn't tell Katie, Daniel is equally determined that Katie will not end up in the same situation as him, he doing whatever he can to help her. — Huggo