DRAMA:  

Ricky [Kris Hitchen], is a former construction worker in Newcastle who lost both his building work and his chance of a mortgage after the economic crash of 2008. Now he is renting with his wife Abbie [Debbie Honeywood], a contract nurse-carer who has to visit dozens of disabled, elderly and vulnerable people every day for their meals, baths and “tuck-ins”. It’s a workload that over the years has left no time for her to tuck in her two kids at the end of the day. Ricky’s mate persuade him to get on what looks like a nice little earner: van driving for a big delivery company. But when work begins, everything looks suspiciously like old-fashioned factory-floor graft. The perks of stable employment – comradeship, sane hour and time off in an emergency – are nowhere to be seen. Parcel by parcel, client by client, this film reveals, unadorned, the implications of today’s franchised workplaces.

A most worthy follow-up to I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s new social-realist drama zeroes in on life as an average British family at the mercy of the modern day ‘gig economy’. SOURCE: NZIFF