Daniel Black, friends call him Dan, 59 years old, from the United Kingdom of Great Britain, commonly known as: British. There are queens, nobles, Cambridge, Dou Sen, Fu Fu... an elegant country, isn't it? of course not.
Where there are nobles, there are those who are exploited. The UK also has a bottom layer. It is said that for eight hundred years after William's landing, the upper class in Britain has been dominated by eight hundred families. Miners, sailors, traffickers and pawns want to move upwards, and their personal struggles are certainly slim. The stable social structure of the United Kingdom has never had a wide range of class mobility. To enter the upper class of London you are familiar with, in addition to the right time, the right place and the right people, luck like "The End of the Game" is also indispensable.
Where there is oppression, there is resistance. Britain is a left-wing resort. It has published "Das Kapital", and has aroused the great New Leftist and Neo-Marxist movement. Director Ken Roach is a leftist fighter. For decades, he has insisted on aiming the camera at the bottom of the working class, standing in the British film scene with a firm and not bowing posture, reminding the world that the United Kingdom is apart from "Downton Abbey" and "Hometown" After the Storm, in addition to the nobles who do not produce, there are also unyielding workers and cruel class solidification.
In "Out of My World", in the face of Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal power, tens of thousands of miners, led by the Mining Workers Union, joined the strike against the free marketization of mines. In order to strike, the workers even had no coal for heating during Christmas, and his father decisively chopped down the piano. However, in order to allow his children to continue their ballet career, he went down to the humiliation under the notoriety of a "traitor". These oppressed faces far away in England are like the silent majority in our country.
In "I Am Black", there are no bad guys in the traditional sense. The only big villain is played by an inefficient and incompetent bureaucracy. Blake’s experience in applying for unemployment benefits has repeatedly run into walls, looking for a job, filling out forms, learning to fill in resumes, etc., but he has never received the unemployment subsidy he deserves. The protagonist who never got inside the door for a lifetime.
Capitalist ethics, the sanctification of work, is a sign of glory, and unemployment is regarded as laziness and the moth that eats benefits. However, the uneven distribution of wealth makes the rich get richer and poorer poorer. Unemployment will make the wealthy people fall from well-off to poverty overnight, and the poor will fall into hunger and cold. Blake was unemployed due to illness, wandering around outside the welfare door, suffering from disaster, anger and despair, and like a person in the "door of the law", he finally fell outside the door of the welfare system. Although the bureaucracy can harm people, the murderer is the ethics of capital.
Black is a carpenter, marginal but enough to make ends meet. However, once he is unemployed, he has to deal with new things such as computers and the Internet, and is forced to join the global competition. In the past, globalization painted a beautiful picture of great harmony in the world, but the reality is that an unprecedentedly rich class that crosses national borders has spawned and united to achieve global exploitation, while the people at the bottom are isolated within their respective borders and suffer silently. The only hope is like "China", Blair's black neighbor, relying on the factory vendors known in Guangzhou to sell branded factory goods on the streets, wiping out the oil of capitalism.
The Cannes judges chose "I Am Black", the United Kingdom chose Brexit, and the Americans chose Trump, but no matter which direction the politics is heading, I hope someone will always have a clear head.
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