I, Daniel Blake · AAC Presents: The Cinema · Artistic Accessibility Collective

I, Daniel Blake(2016)

Ken Loach's Palme d'Or winner at Cannes is one of the most important films about disability and poverty made in the past twenty years. Daniel Blake is a middle-aged carpenter with a heart condition who is simultaneously told by his doctors he cannot work and by the welfare system that he is fit for work. The film's systematic documentation of how bureaucratic cruelty operates on disabled and poor bodies is devastating — and was made in close collaboration with benefit claimants and disability advocates. Not a disability arts film in the conventional sense, but essential context for anyone working in arts access: this is the material reality of many disabled people's lives.