Veteran socialist filmmaker Ken Loach (who turned 80 last summer) announced his retirement in 2014. A year later when the Conservative Party was re-elected to power in the UK he changed his mind and set to work on I, Daniel Blake from a screenplay by regular collaborator Paul Laverty. The result has already proven his biggest success in years, a devastating indictment of a once-robust social welfare system now diminished to a Kafkaesque bureaucratic quagmire that won the top prize at Cannes.

Daniel (Dave Johns) is a defiant 59-year-old carpenter who is cautioned not to go back to work after a severe heart attack. His benefits case worker, however, comes to a different conclusion, and his state aid is threatened. In the meantime Daniel befriends an unemployed single mother, Katie (Hayley Squires), who is also struggling below the poverty line. Together they battle to retain some vestige of human dignity and respect.

Even if the UK's benefits system seems alien to American eyes, the movie's searing, scarcely satiric fury at government red tape will surely strike a chord, as will its heart-breaking compassion for the dispossessed.

Winner: Palme d'Or (Best Film), Cannes; Audience Awards, Locarno, Vancouver