Hacker Cinema
I, Daniel Blake
2016 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Ken Loach
A 59-year-old carpenter recovering from a heart attack befriends a single mother and her two kids as they navigate the impersonal, Kafkaesque benefits system. With equal amounts of humour, warmth and despair, the journey is heartfelt and emotional until the end.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Sorry we missed you does a superb job of showing the cycle of poverty and how it affects families. The accuracy of the film stems from interviews while director Ken Loach was filming I, Daniel Blake in Newcastle.
Watch the film I, Daniel Blake, because my comment is kind of dependent on that.
The movie does such a good job portraying how change is inevitable. From an American pov, I've always admired how the UK has stuff like Gov.uk, a real at-the-forefront use of technology to make government more transparent and efficient, not to mention cool. It has always seemed functional and user-oriented. And, it's lightyears ahead of anything we have in the US to centralize or standardize basic stuff like paper forms.
But then in the movie, you see a guy that you probably know try to run a mouse up a computer screen to complete an unemployment form, by physically placing the mouse on the screen. And then get frustrated when he's not allowed help, but then asks 3 different young people walking by to help him navigate the form, before the form times out and he loses all his data.
Like, even if the developers and designers of the website tried with all their effort to make their page accessible and even more user friendly, what can be done? The enemy isn't the government for trying to modernize, and it's not poor people who may or may not have gotten stuck in time for whatever reason. The enemy is just change, where you don't realize these stories exist. So to bring it back to the OP - there is a real value in seeing and hearing these stories.
Last year's Palme dOr at Cannes was the British film I, Daniel Blake. It was a fantastic gut punch for how even well-intentioned technology is leaving behind parts of society. My partner and I had a very heated 2 hour discussion after watching it.