A powerful, passionate, colourful and gripping story about kids. The film provides an uncompromising picture of 24 turbulent hours in the lives of a group of teenagers who, like all teenagers, believe they are invincible. We see the kids in an urban jungle in present-day America on a day when everything and nothing will change. The director tries to capture the beauty and tragedy of contemporary youth in very directly filmed images. As a mirror of our age, the film portrays the experiences, attitudes and insecurities of the group of teenagers with rough honesty. Director Larry Clark, one of the world’s best known photographers, had already shot thousands of stills of young people in his own home surroundings before making his début film. He had thought about making this film before, but his encounter with 18-year-old Harmony Korine, who told him he had written a screenplay about his contemporaries, was decisive. In a relatively short period, Clark shot the film with non- professional actors because he wanted to tell this story about the group from the inside. Kids caused a furore when it opened in the States, audiences being especially shocked by the explicit and unsafe sex in this age of AIDS. Larry Clark: ‘I always wanted to make the teenage movie that had never been made in America, The Great American Teenage Movie, like The Great American Novel. I think that most of us when we see the film think: Yes, that’s what we were like.’
