The Selfish Giant

Excluded from school in Bradford, thirteen-year-old Arbor and his friend Swifty try to make money collecting scrap. Kitten, the scrap dealer, lends them a horse and cart and buys what they bring back cheap. Swifty is good with horses, and when Kitten notices he starts using the boy for trotting races. Left outside, Arbor takes bigger risks: stealing live cable. The film is not interested in juvenile crime. It is interested in an adult using children: Kitten forces nobody, he simply takes the opportunity in front of him, and the film holds him responsible without making him a monster. The giant in Wilde's tale was, after all, a man who refused to share his garden. The form is British social realism: the scrapyard, fields, pylons, grey sky. The landscape is relentlessly industrial and the boys are always small in the frame. Clio Barnard wrote and directed, taking freely from Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant. The film screened in Directors' Fortnight at Cannes on 16 May 2013 and won the Europa Cinemas award. Barnard was named a significant new voice in British cinema for it. Conner Chapman plays Arbor and Shaun Thomas plays Swifty; neither was a professional actor. Who it is for: viewers who like British realism in the line of Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold. Who it is not for: anyone looking for consolation. The film gives the boys no way out and its ending is hard.