In times of brazenfaced selfishness, with Brexit, the rise of Trump, the closure of borders and lack of sensibility towards refugees and the ‘other’, it is heartening that Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016) has been so well received across the Globe. Even in my native Brazil, where Congress has just passed a Constitutional Amendment drastically reducing the Brazilian State’s responsibility for social welfare, critics have been raving about I, Daniel Blake.

Whilst the mere mention of the word ‘socialism’ leaves some foaming at the mouth, it is at least reassuring that film buffs are touched by Ken’s portrayal of life at the forgotten end of society. Even if these critics and buffs do not represent the current tastes of most in society.

It may also be fitting to remember that exactly 50 years ago, at a time when the European continent was still busy building social democracy after the ravages of the War, Ken Loach’s landmark drama Cathy Come Home (1966; pictured at the top) – describing the plight of a working-class family’s descent into poverty – led to the creation of Crisis, the homeless organisation. They explain on their website: “Crisis was set up as a cross-party attempt to raise awareness of homelessness and destitution in East London, backed by the public groundswell of support following Cathy Come Home”.

Taking matters into my hands

Last year, I decided to spend Christmas volunteering with Crisis. Before starting our volunteering period, I received some data as part of our training: In 2015, almost 4,000 people were living in the streets of England each night. An increase of 30% on the year before almost the double of 2010. This does not even include those living in emergency accommodation, hostels, in people’s floor or squats. Approximately 60,000 families had nowhere to live and that over a quarter of a million approached their local housing departments for support with homelessness, also in 2015.

Let’s now move 10 years back in time. According to a crisis coordinator, the year of 2007/08 saw the smallest number of people living in the streets, at just 205. There was much optimism, and it was thought that the war on homelessness was about to be won. The focus on social policy, even in the form adopted by New Labour, was indeed making a difference for those at the bottom of society, and the ravages of the economic crisis were not yet to felt.

Along with the economic downturn came a change of government and the Coalition started their regime of cuts to public expenditure. These changes were welcomed by a large chunk of the population already accustomed to the media’s mantra that the negative economic performance was the result of the Labour Party’s willingness to ‘waste money on inefficient social policies’.

Today, with the NHS reaching breaking point and the exponential growth in food banks, it is clear that cuts brought about in order to achieve ‘efficiency savings’ or deal with those that ‘take advantage’ system, invariably impact on the lives of the most vulnerable members of society. I, Daniel Blake reveals precisely this phenomenon.

Cuts in housing benefit, mental health (80% of homeless people suffer from some sort of mental health problem) and social services are some of the factors that have led to an increase in homelessness. Other reasons are the recession, low pay and xenophobia. In London, last year 35% of homeless people were from Eastern Europe. Many end up on the street because they lost their jobs.

In our centre, the number of Eastern Europeans was very significant. A Romanian man told me that he lost his job when the company he worked for went bankrupt. He had been homeless for 22 days. There were also many Africans, mainly refugees from Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia. Cuts in funding for local authorities resulted in a strict interpretation of housing legislation, so that only those groups of people considered ‘priority’ receive support.

Cathy vs Katie

In a world distant from the 1960s of Cathy Come Home, Katie (Hayley Squires), in I, Daniel Blake struggles with a different sort of homeless. One that pushes her away from her family, miles away from London, to Newcastle where she can no longer rely on friends and family.

Just as Ken Loach chose to portray a different facet of homelessness, highlight a hidden aspect of what it means to be homeless and poor in the 21st Century, in today’s world different strategies are needed to harness people’s support and compassion.

During our one day training I asked myself why Crisis needed so many generalist volunteers. I understood the need for specialists: cooks, doctors, hairdressers, nurses, etc. But why would you need so many generalist volunteers, like us?

This year there were almost 12,000 volunteers for 4,500 homeless people. Almost four volunteers per homeless person. Just think: one of the main complaints of the homeless is that they are invisible. Then, 10 days a year, they are spoiled by four willing persons. People to open doors for them, people to wait on them, people to play cards with… People!

My teenage daughter even joked on the way to the centre, singing ironically: “we’re going to work for Crisis, we’re going to do gap duty, we’re going to block the doorways so the homeless can’t come in…”

Jokes apart, it is true that we spent a lot of time doing the so-called gap duty. That is, sitting with another person in front of some door or other, by an activity room, near the bathrooms or improvised dormitories. It strange as it may seem, but gap duties have their reason. Firstly, because these centres are temporary, having other functions throughout the year. Ours was a school, so there were many areas restricted to our ‘guests’. Secondly, because there is a real need to supervision. After all, we were dealing with vulnerable people, many of whom under the influence of alcohol or drugs. That is why we needed to be in pairs. Thirdly, and perhaps the real reason behind our work, is that it is a way for us, generalist volunteers, to have contact with the homeless.

Compassion and complicity

But perhaps most important is the individual experience of each volunteer. It is a time for personal awareness, where it is hoped that the time spent with the homeless will open their minds. When a volunteer opens a door to a homeless person, sits with them at the dinner table, blocks the entrance to the dormitory whilst they queue up for the best spaces near the walls, he or she is induced to share experiences, to chat and, in this way, be able to see that that person they have walked past so many times in the streets, making them feel uncomfortable, making them look the other way, is not different from us.

That if it were not for our circumstances: where we were born, where we come from, our health, our education… it could be us instead of them being ignored by the steps of a bank, it could be us being kicked by a wealthy drunkard on his way home from a party.

When Loach launched Cathy Come Home in 1966, society was differently organised, people felt more bonded to each other and society was more cohesive. Some say that people’s hardships and sacrifices before and during the war provided enough justification for the ties of solidarity and the development of the welfare state. Others that the threat of looming communism made governments accept the need to provide the population with some sort of assistance. Others still believe that solidarity disappeared with the rising power of individualism and a laisser–faire culture.

Whatever the reasons, we seem to be living in an era where it is necessary to remind us that life can take an unexpected turn and that, at the end of the day, we are all the same. Crisis does it through volunteering, Ken Loach through cinema.

…

You too can volunteer at Crisis – just click here for more information.

And don’t forget to check out our review of I, Daniel Blake and our exclusive interview with Ken Loach.

Is love a privilege reserved for a few lucky people? Is it a social requirement or a personal choice? Is it a feeling or an asset? Is it free or is it circumspect? What about marriage? Nowadays we have a broad and inclusive concept of love and its intimate associate called marriage, and we tend to accept and celebrate nearly every shape and form of thise. But this wasn’t the in many parts of the US in the 1950s, before the Civil Rights Movement took off.

At the age of 18, Mildred (Ruth Negga) fell in love and became pregnant with Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) in Caroline County, Virginia. Mildred was a person “of colour”, while Richard was white. In June 1958, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. in order to get married, thereby evading Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made marriage between whites and non-whites a crime punishable by law. They were eventually arrested and sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for 25 years under the condition that they abandoned the state immediately. So they left their families behind and promptly moved to Washington DC. They were arrested again when they returned to Virginia so that Mildred could give birth to her first child at home.

They were cleared when their lawyer intervened, saying that he mistakingly advised the couple that they could come back for a brief visit. They then settled in Washington DC, where they had three children and constantly longed for the homeland in Virginia. Washington and Virginia are neighbouring states, but yet they couldn’t be more distant for the Lovings, who were not allowed to visit their friends and relatives. It’s as if there was a wall between the two federal states, not too different from the wall that Donald Trump wants to build on the border with Mexico, or the wall that Salma Hayek had to break down in Beatriz at Dinner (Miguel Arteta, 2017). All three are racial segregation walls, ugly scars on the face of a country that likes to describe itself as the “land of the free”.

Fortunately, the winds of change blew in favour of the Lovings in the following decade, as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. Lawyer Bernard S. Cohen (Nick Kroll) took interest in their case, and eventually tokk it to the US Supreme Court. The consequent ruling in their favour was a landmark civil rights decision: it invalidated all laws prohibiting interracial marriage – odious legislation with origins deeply rooted in slavery – in the entire American territory.

Sadly, times have changed again and now the winds of racism and bigotry have now turned around and they are ready to devastate the US. On November 8th 2016, 50.3% of Caroline Country voted put a white, deeply racist, divisive and segregationist president in the White House, and as we all know Donald Trump was inaugurated just two weeks ago. These tragic developments make Loving far more urgent and significant.

Jeff Nichols’s hand is subtle and elegant, very respectful of the subject. The filmmaker makes an effort to be neither intrusive and exploitative. The movie if flooded with effusive natural lighting – something he had done in last year’s Midnight Special (click here for our exclusive review of his previous movie), which gives it a warm and vaguely ethereal atmosphere to the movie. The two leads deliver quiet and taciturn performances to match the gentle narrative. The Lovings were known to be reserved and camera-shy, and Richard refused to be described as a hero. The only problem is that they are so timid that at times it feels like there is little chemistry between the two actors.

Loving is not a melodrama, full of vigour and flare. It’s instead a film effective in its delicateness at dealing with such an urgent subject matter. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday February 3rd, and you can watch the movie trailer below before heading to the cinema:

Mexican actress and producer Salma Hayek hits the US on the face with the dramatic comedy Beatriz at Dinner. The film played at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24th, one night before Donald Trump signed the construction of the border wall between US and Mexico. The president has started to reshape US immigration enforcement policies via executive action, building a border wall and punishing “sanctuary cities”. Salma’s character shows us that such wall is already firmly in place.

Salma Hayek plays a Reiki healer and a sensitive Mexican immigrant who lives in the outskirts of Los Angeles. She has an office in a cancer clinic, but she also serves rich people in luxurious mansions. One day, she visits Cathy (Connie Britton), the mother of a young woman whom she helped to recover from chemotherapy. After her usual holistic therapy session with Cathy, Beatriz is ready to go back home to her goats and dogs. Beatriz loves animals and she is a vegetarian.

Fate keeps Beatriz inside the house. Her car breaks down. Cathy invites her to stay for dinner, but the idea of having a Mexican employee in a business dinner is not welcomed by Cathy’s husband, Grant (David Warshofsky). The dinner is being held in order to celebrate a business deal with Doug (John Lithgow), who builds resorts in idyllic locations.

The other guests – played by Chloë Sevigny, John Lithgow, Amy Landecker and Jay Duplass – mistake Beatriz for a maid. At first, Beatriz doesn’t realise the huge class gap between herself and the rich Americans. She is proud of her work and tries to convince every guest of the importance of healing, spirituality, and of love for nature and animals. Cathy politely explains to the other guests how Beatriz helped her daughter to fight cancer, but soon she realises that Beatriz is a threat at dinner. She won’t stop embarrassing the hosts with her spiritual and social commentary.

The way Salma sees Beatriz is key to understanding the contribution that Mexicans make to the US, especially female immigrants. She brings strength, wisdom and innocence to her character. She is impulsive and gentle at the same time. She challenges the social barriers and respects mankind. She is the quintessential Latin American in Hollywood as well as in the indie scene – the film falls in the latter category.

Beatriz becomes increasingly unsettled. She thinks that she has previously met Doug. She asks whether he has ever built a hotel in her hometown in Mexico and begins to suspect that he is the man who caused many deaths and an environmental tragedy. The narrative then provides not one, but two twists, revealing Beatriz’s subliminal determination to take revenge on behalf of her people. The script is cleverly written so to reveal the ugly face of American society. People like Doug – who have no respect for immigrants and will still heap the financial benefits they offer – have now been legitimised by Donald Trump’s election. The film is a harsh criticism of the social barriers that already exist in Los Angeles.

We don’t know yet when the film will hit the cinema, but if you follow us on Twitter we will inform you in good time! Meanwhile, you can watch the film trailer below:

Just how did I fail it?

The black sheep

Now let’s turn things around: what about about films that pass the Bechdel test but offer a very poor representation of the female?

Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald deliver a sequel to their 1996 Scottish indie crossover hit Trainspotting. The movie is based on Irvine Welsh’s novels Porno and Trainspotting. Twenty years later, two of the three former heroin addicts Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) and Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) are clean of the highly addictive drug, though Sick Boy still uses cocaine as often as he can. Spud (Ewan Bremner) was clean too until he lost his job. Psychopathic criminal Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is serving a prison sentence – until he escapes.

T2 builds so directly on Trainspotting that you’ll want to watch that first. Mark has spent two decades in Amsterdam after taking Sick Boy and Begbie’s share of Trainspotting’s drug money. Before Sick Boy’s motivation inexplicably peters out, his and Begbie’s desire for vengeance drives T2.

Meanwhile Sick Boy is pimping his franchise newcomer girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) and promising to set her up as a brothel madam. Trainspotting’s Diane (Kelly Macdonald) and Gail (Shirley Henderson) appear briefly on the margins but T2 focuses instead on the male characters.

The narrative increasingly flashes back to or recreates events or scenes from Trainspotting, turning itself into a self-referential text. Renton bounces over a car bonnet in a frantic flight from a pursuer and dances to an LP record in the surreal environment of his ever-lengthening bedroom. Trainspotting’s transcendent freeze frame when Begbie throws a glass over a pub balcony, paid off by an unfreezing and a continuation some five minutes later, is rerun to no real effect and without the payoff so many times in T2’s first reel that you soon cease to care.

You might forgive these characters as young twenty-something addicts but it’s harder when they’re forty-somethings lacking the excuse of youth. Begbie was never particularly sympathetic, but Renton and Sick Boy also prove less likeable this time round. Unexpectedly, the one high point here is Spud reinventing himself as the writer/chronicler of the foursome’s individual and collective stories. He is moving on, whereas his three friends are stuck in the past.

And that’s the big problem. T2 doesn’t know how to be a good sequel to Trainspotting without rerunning it and falls back on convoluted plot and editing in the process. Trainspotting was perfectly timed at 94 minutes; T2 is an overlong 118. Trainspotting was made by a young and naive cast and crew and succeeded on its own youthful energy; T2 is a nostalgia fest.

T2 Trainspotting is out in the UK on Friday, January 27th. Watch the film trailer below:

The Sundance Film Festival kicked off on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration. The event’s line-up carries a strong message of resistance against the impending erosion of human rights and freedoms that his government could represent. Whose Streets? – an energetic documentary by the activist and filmmaker Sabaah Folayan – shows the inconvenient truth behind the dramatic scenes that took place in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. An African American unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, was killed by police and left lying on the street for hours, despite the many witnesses and a CCTV camera just around the the corner.

Festival founder and chairman Robert Redford claimed at the opening of the event: “Documentaries become more important when journalism on TV is not showing what is going on for real”, and Whose Streets? is the genuine expression. The crew flew to St. Louis and Ferguson in order to register the uprising of the local population, mostly Blacks and poor people. Whilst national broadcasting companies such as CNN spread images of horror, including the ransacking of supermarkets, Folayan went to talk to the locals. They soon found out that rioting and protesting “is the language of the unheard”.

The Black vigilantes decide to become their own keepers, since the police was not doing their work, and often disrespecting the Constitution. The protests include riots, arson and speaking up words of anger in front of troops armed with tear gas grenades, guns and sniffing dogs. The situation got worse when the memorial for Michael Brown was destroyed to free the streets for the traffic, as the flowers were in the middle of the road. Governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, said it was a “corporate decision”. The uprising became the reawakening of the Civil Rights Movement. It exposed a racial bias in Ferguson police department: the white police officer Darren Wilson who shot Michael Brown was declared not guilty, in a case with consequences remarkably similar to Stephen Lawrence’s murder in the UK.

The documentary is frenetic and tense. The close shots of people give the sensation you are standing right by their side, protesting on the streets, and vulnerable to the violence surrounding them. You can feel that they are fighting not only for their rights, but also for their lives.

It is moving that the demonstrations attracted all sorts people: men, women and children. Parents brought their children to the streets, despite the fear of violence, in order to teach them how to be activists. There is hope that there will be more justice and equity for Black people in the future. They established the now influential organisation Black Lives Matter. It aims to rebuild the Black Liberation Movement more inclusive of women, LGBT people and people everywhere in the gender spectrum.

Whose Streets? is in the US documentary section of the Sundance Festival Film Festival taking place right now – DMovies is live at the event. You can access the official film website by clicking here. The movie is currently seeking distributors.