I, Daniel Blake

Winner in Cannes last year, Loach remains faithful to social cinema and presents a case study on how bureaucracy destroys the individual. His second Palm d'Or comes exactly 10 years after his first victory with The Wind That Shakes The Barley, a historic piece on Irish independence that has failed to endure the time test and is one of the most forgettable contemporary winners of the highly praised award.

However, Loach works are better when they are located in present time and deal with current social issues, and I, Daniel Blake certainly is a poignant critic to how the institutions are a system to break the working class. Loach knows that to show the true colors of an adverse society, you have to tackle a deep realism in all the components of the film and bares the aesthetic to the most simple neorealist elements. But a minimal aesthetics lets the character and the situation shine, and baring a film of cinematic artifices tends to show the threads in the filmmaking, but Loach has already mastered a way to work with non-actors and get great performances of them, so the characters move with ease through a very well crafted screenplay that allows us to see, through them, how much the class structures are designed to perpetuate themselves and will systematically prevent social growth. Is a film that forces ourselves to throw questions to the way our society works, and it's managed by presenting the pains in everyday situations instead of tragic scenes (the moment when Katie has a breakdown in the food bank is the highest drama the entire film gets, but the contention in that simple act is monumental).

It's difficult to say if this film alone will endure the time test (I'm incline to say that it has better chances than The Wind That Shakes The Barley), but right now, it will be difficult that contest that Ken Loach is one of the best directors adapting the neorealism of Vittorio da Sica and even the social critics of Charles Dickens to contemporary life.