Ken Loach directs this drama that follows a 59-year-old joiner as he tries to navigate the British benefits system.

In the North-East of England, widower Daniel Blake is forced to stop working when he is taken ill with heart disease and so applies for Employment and Support Allowance from the Government. But his life is further thrown into disarray when his benefits are suddenly taken away from him and he is forced to jump through the many hoops of the bureaucratic system to get them back. During this time, he meets the similarly-troubled single mother Katie whose financial problems mean she is being forced out of her home in London along with her two kids Dylan and Daisy.

This critically-acclaimed film was nominated for five BAFTAs including Best Film, Best Director (Loach), Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress (Squires) and won the award for Outstanding British Film of the Year.

The boy who comes back from a war far away in a wooden box is glorified and called a hero. As the funeral plans are made in a small Kent town, his siblings squabble over who he was. Maybe the fanfare isn't needed for this heroic martyr."Vera Vera Vera" is a blackly comic play about what we are willing to fight for. Her first work for the theatre, Hayley Squires is a bracing new voice, clear eyed and loud, looking at violence, neglect and apathy. Depicting a gritty slice of social realism, "Vera Vera Vera" portrays the disjunction between the lives of the surviving family against the memories and patriotic commemoration for the dead. Looking at drug addiction, crime, verbal and domestic abuse, engrained racism, the characters' downtrodden and trapped lives are exposed with honesty and verve.This brave and uncompromising play questions both the validity of the myth of the martyred soldier and the true worth of survival for those left behind.