— Overview
The essay does not treat the film as a British curiosity. It asks whether a form on a screen can stand in for a person when someone has grown old, grown tired, and come to ask for help.
— Contents and key concepts
A news item, then a film about a counter that no longer looks back
A Korean essay on Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake begins not with Cannes, but with a newspaper story. For a period of one year, the writer had read, a considerable share of welfare payments in Korea was said to have been claimed by wrongful means. The first response is almost a laugh of disbelief: how, the writer asks, can that be the fact that leads the coverage, when the harder question is what happens to a person who actually needs help.
The film, from 2016, written by Paul Laverty and led by Dave Johns as Daniel and Hayley Squires as Katie, gives the essay its second fact. Daniel is a joiner in Newcastle who, after a heart attack, has to ask the state for help for the first time. What meets him is not, first, a person. It is a set of forms that have to be completed on a computer.
Procedure first, the person second
The essay dwells on that scene because it feels, to the writer, unlike common sense. An older man whose strength has gone is told that the way to support runs through a screen. The welfare office, as the essay reads the film, has learned to put the procedure ahead of the person who came to the door. The film’s attempt, the essay says, is to put a human being back above the law of the form, and to put human regard above the system that administers it.
That attempt is admired, and it also leaves a bitter aftertaste. Between the film’s moral order and the everyday office, the writer feels a gap. The Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2016 is mentioned only as context; it is not the point. The point is what a digitized counter does to someone who has no one to type for them.
A net that still has a person in it
From that bitterness the essay turns to a proposal that is modest and firm. A welfare net is needed that can still hold people who have been left at the edge, and it has to be a net of person to person, not only a net of logins and queued tickets. Katie’s presence in the film is kept in view as proof that the same office can fail more than one kind of life at once.
The writer does not pretend that a film can rewrite an administration. It can, the essay argues, make the computerized counter visible as a choice rather than as a law of nature. A longer Korean version of this account is on CampusDown.
Sources
- A student essay on Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, starting from news of wrongful benefit claims and asking for a welfare net that still has a person in it.
Last updated 15 November 2026
Frequently asked questions
Who made I, Daniel Blake, and who plays the two people at its center?
Ken Loach directed the 2016 film, from a screenplay by Paul Laverty. Dave Johns plays Daniel Blake, a joiner from Newcastle who needs state help after a heart attack. Hayley Squires plays Katie, a single mother whose path crosses his inside the same welfare office.
What does the Korean essay take as its starting point?
A news report that a large share of welfare payments in Korea had been claimed by wrongful means. The writer’s first reaction is disbelief, then a turn to the film, which shows an older man asked to fill out computerized forms in order to receive the support he came to request.
What kind of welfare net does the essay want?
A net in which a person still stands above a procedure, and human regard is not ranked below the system. The film, the essay says, attempts that order even when everyday practice falls short of it.
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