The Selfish Giant

2013 | Color | 93 min.

Thirteen-year-old Arbor and his best friend Swifty, both expelled from school, meet local scrap-dealer, Kitten, and begin collecting scrap metal for him using a horse and cart. Swifty has a natural gift with horses while Arbor is keen to impress Kitten and make some money. But when Kitten begins to favor Swifty, leaving Arbor hurt and excluded, Arbor becomes increasingly greedy and exploitive, leading to a tragic event, that transforms them all.

Country: Reino Unido
Direction: Barnard; Clio
Script: Barnard; Clio
Production: O’Riordan; Tracy
Photography: Eley; Mike
Participation year at FICM: 2013

Director Movies

The Arbor

British playwright Andrea Dunbar was 19 when her play The Arbor was staged at London?s Royal Court Theatre in 1980. Its raw, incisive portrayal of the cycles of violence and addiction on a tough Bradford housing estate is drawn directly from her own experience, brutalized and pregnant at 15. Two plays and one film later, the young playwright died, at age 29. Clio Barnard?s film looks both at Dunbar?s life and the experiences of the young family she left behind and in particular her eldest daughter whose life followed a downward spiral remarkably similar to that of her mother?s.