The Selfish Giant

The time-honoured British tradition of committed social-realist cinema still exists. With this widely crowned debut, loosely inspired by the story by Oscar Wilde, the genre even has new life blown into it.
The two 13-year-old friends Swifty and Arbor are kicked out of school. In the harsh, almost 19th-century setting of a working-class district near the industrial town of Bradford, the street urchins regard this as a ticket to freedom. They want to earn money by ‘collecting’ metal, and that leads them to scrap metal merchant Kitten, who mainly earns his money on illegal horse races. When he finds out that Swifty is mad about horses, he doesn’t dally but takes him on as a jockey for his races.
Barnard already made a name for herself as the maker of the experimental documentary The Arbor, but here she shows that she also has complete control over all aspects of fiction directing. The two young actors make a stunning acting debut.