Sebbe

Sebbe is fifteen and lives with his mother in a flat that is much too small. He is beaten at school and shouted at at home, and he answers back to none of it. His only refuge is the scrapyard; there he makes things out of the parts he finds and there he has some power. But his world narrows a little more every day until he has nobody left except his mother. Babak Najafi's first film describes not a crime but a process: a child being systematically isolated. The telling excuses nothing and sensationalises nothing; it declares nobody guilty on their own, not the mother, not the school, not the boy. It took the first feature award at the Berlin Film Festival and the Guldbagge for best film in Sweden. The ending is heavy.