Nickel Boys

Elwood is about to start college in Florida when a ride in a stolen car sends him to a reform school called Nickel Academy. The school has nothing to do with its official description: beatings, forced labour and boys who disappear. Elwood believes in justice; Turner, whom he meets there, believes in surviving. The way these two see is the axis of the film. RaMell Ross directed. The source is Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel. Nickel Academy stands in for the Dozier School for Boys, a real institution in Florida where more than a hundred students died from abuse. The most radical thing about the film is the camera. Ross shot the whole of it in first person: the viewer sees through Elwood's eyes and then through Turner's. He did it with the cinematographer Jomo Fray by rigging cameras to the actors' bodies. The camera operators worked almost cheek to cheek with the actors, both so the eyeline would be real and so they could reach out and touch the other people in the scene. The two points of view are built differently. What Elwood sees is happening now; Turner's is a memory looked back on from the future, which leaves what is real and what is clouded deliberately uncertain. The film also uses archive footage of the period, setting what happens to the boys beside images of social progress in the sixties. Who it is for: viewers who want formal risk and are curious about how a novel can be turned into cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting to settle into a familiar kind of storytelling. The first-person camera is tiring at first and the film never once relaxes the choice.