^{After having suffered a heart-attack, a 59-year-old carpenter must fight the bureaucratic forces of the system in order to receive Employment and Support Allowance.} 

REVIEW

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From the title election is clear, this is the story of a Daniel Blake (Dave Johns), a middle-aged widower who works as a carpenter in Newcastle, England who just survived a fatal heart attack, lucky? Not really, because after that Blake's life does not get any better. It is recommended not to go back to work given his unstable condition, Blake volunteered to follow, ESA (Employment and Support Allowance), a social program of the British government in helping financially for its hard-to-find citizens due to long-term illness or people with disabilities. But for one reason or another, Blake failed to get an ESA that made him an appeal, but of course, it was not an easy matter. The combination of complicated bureaucracy and Blake's inability to adapt to the cruel system made him trapped in a vicious circle that seemed endless. 

Through I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach tries to illustrate how a system that is actually designed to help humanity can actually kill you slowly. Focusing on Paul Laverty's manuscript to the lower middle class workers, especially the elderly and the disadvantaged in life, Loach again used a natural approach to describing a social condition. It is interesting to see how Loach positions itself in the midst of conflict, bringing about a moral and social dilemma in which on the one hand there is a system designed to help those who are unable to with strict rules to avoid abuse but on the one hand the severity of the system labeled " Humanity "instead of being your master's weapon. It can be very inhumane when dealing with certain cases that require handling outside the manual, kicking out the aid applicants who do not qualify for granted without moral considerations. 

Daniel Blake is just a fictional character, but not with the features Loach is currently encountering which is a compilation of real events that are happening on the ground. Makes the figure of Daniel Blake a representative of those who fail to penetrate the regulatory labyrinth. Loach introduces Blake as an elderly man with a big heart, even though he is rude and outspoken at times, but we can also see how stubborn Blake and his naivete are making his ESA rejected and troubling him to death. Blake is a human born outside the system, he is more eloquent using a keyboard or smartphones pencil that is too imperceptible to his old brain, so we can really understand when having dizzy seven when requested online requirements. 

Not only Blake, Loach also introduced Katie (Hayley Squires), single mother two children who are in a situation and conditions are not far away. Wasted from London due to economic hardship, Katie is the victim that ESA rejected because it was just a few minutes late. His encounter with Blake made him a warm and hopeful and warm humorous drama but at the same time also filled with pain and despair, look at the scene in a devastating food bank. The combination of two different characters of this age in the two children added Katie then formed a relationship like a family. There is a happy togetherness in the midst of an uncertain situation.

If there are deficiencies in I, Daniel Blake may be because we easily see the end, even long before the movie finishes. But that did not matter, anyway, Loach had mended it very well thanks to the brilliant directing coupled with the slick performance of his two main players, Dave Johns and Hayley Squires who were able to move Laverty's emotions and narrations containing a flicking message about a humanitarian bureaucratic system that was apparently not so human For some less fortunate people.

RATING (8/10)

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