I, Daniel Blake

Daniel Blake is a fifty-nine-year-old carpenter in Newcastle. After a heart attack, his doctors tell him he cannot work. The state disagrees: a benefits assessment declares him fit, and Daniel is thrown into a maze of phone queues, online forms he cannot fill in, and job searches for work he is not allowed to do. At the job centre he meets Katie, a young single mother just moved up from London with her two children, who is being crushed by the same machine. They start helping each other.

Ken Loach and his writer Paul Laverty have been making films about working people for decades, and this one is as direct as anything they have done. Dave Johns, a stand-up comedian, is wonderful as Daniel: stubborn, funny, decent, a man who simply wants to be treated with respect. Hayley Squires as Katie breaks your heart, especially in the food bank scene, which is one of the most painful moments in recent British cinema.

Some will say it is too simple, the villains too clear. I don't think it matters. The film is angry about something real, and it makes that anger personal through two people you come to love. It won Loach his second Palme d'Or. A plain, humane, furious film about dignity, and about a system designed to wear people down until they give up.