How Ken Loach's anti-austerity tale won the Palme d'Or

British director Ken Loach has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the second time with his drama I, Daniel Blake, about a man struggling with the welfare system.

Loach, who turns 80 next month, previously won the prestigious award for 2006's The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

The director came out of retirement to make the film with long-time collaborator and scriptwriter Paul Laverty. He told a press conference he was "quietly stunned" to have won the award with "the same little gang", reports the BBC.

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Asked about his future plans, he said: "When you get very old, you're just pleased to see the sunrise the next day, so we'll just take each day as it comes."

I, Daniel Blake stars comedian Dave Johns as Daniel, a 59-year-old carpenter in Newcastle who reluctantly applies for benefits when a heart condition stops him from working. As he struggles to navigate the welfare system, he meets single mother Katie (Hayley Squires), who has been forced to travel 300 miles to find accommodation for her family.

Cannes' judges praised the film's sensitive depictions of characters who "find themselves in no-man's land, caught on the barbed wire of welfare bureaucracy as played out against the rhetoric of 'striver and skiver' in modern day Britain".

The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw says it contains "shades of Dickens and Orwell" and calls it "a movie with a fierce, simple dignity of its own".

This blunt, moving film is not objective, he points out, and Loach "intervenes in the messy, ugly world of poverty with the intention of making us see that it really is happening" in this prosperous nation.

Dave Calhoun in Time Out says this is a spare film, unflashy, with no crowd-pleasing genre leanings and barely any score and is "more powerful and urgent for it". Loach tells his tale straight, with no need for bells and whistles, but with some humour and "a whole load of passion and fury".

Variety's Owen Gleiberman praises I, Daniel Blake as "a work of scalding and moving relevance" and one of Loach's finest films. It is "a drama of tender devastation" with an "unblinking neorealist simplicity" reminiscent of Italian director Vittorio De Sica, he says.

The story is "sure to resonate across national borders", adds Gleiberman, because it's about something more than bureaucratic cruelty - it captures a world "in which the opportunity to thrive, or even just survive, is shrinking by the minute".

Loach wasn't the only British winner at Cannes. Andrea Arnold took out the Jury Prize with her road movie American Honey. Both Arnold's and Loach's films were shot by Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan.