Kris Hitchen, Debbie Honeywood, Rhys Stone
Ken Loach returns to the milieu of 2016’s I, Daniel Blake with the fierce, vital Sorry We Missed You, supported by his long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty and producer Rebecca O’Brien. A passionate indictment of Tory austerity, it explores how the British economy’s odds are increasingly stacked against the working class, via the incendiary story of one family’s struggle to achieve anything but basic survival on an unpredictable minimum wage.
Ricky (Kris Hitchen) lost his job and mortgage in the 2008 financial crash. Now renting with his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), a contract nurse and carer and their two kids, he is unable to pass up a job driving for a big delivery company. But it turns out the zero-hours job offers no support and no benefits; he must buy or lease his own van and meet strict and unreasonable targets. Alarmed by their rising debts, and with his wife facing exploitative pressures in her own job, their family life becomes ever more toxic.
Rigorously researched via off-the-record interviews, Sorry We Missed You depicts the ruinous cost of zero-hours contracts with gut-wrenching honesty and integrity. A furious and heart-breaking film, it offers a rigorous and damning critique of our unequal system; showing how it unscrupulously exploits people, especially those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and robs them of dignity, agency and hope for change.
