The Selfish Giant

Inspired by the Oscar Wilde Victorian fairytale story of the same name, 'The Selfish Giant' is a contemporary fable about  two teenage boys who get caught up in the world of copper theft.
Directed by Clio Barnard, 'The Selfish Giant' has characters based upon people Barnard met whilst researching The Arbor in and around the Buttershaw estate in Bradford, including a 14 year old boy called Matty who had been scavenging metal to sell to scrap dealers from the age of 11.  By melding down the two contradictory genres of fairytales and social realism, Barnard's aspiration is to construct a contemporary, realist fable.

The concept of social realism was first introduced to films from the literacy devices of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. One of the first British films to emphasise social realism was James Williamson's 'A Reservist Before the War and After the War' in 1902. At the time, social realism in cinema was reflecting Britain's transforming wartime society. Later in the 1940's, social realism was also adopted by Hindi films.

Press reactions:

The Guardian - 'Barnard's storytelling is heartfelt and passionate, fluent and supremely confident and this is a heart-wrenching movie with some stunning set pieces' - Peter Bradshaw

The Telegraph - 'So hauntingly perfect is Barnard's film, and so skin-prickingly alive does it make you feel to watch it, that at first you can hardly believe the sum of what you have seen: the astonishingly strong performances from her two young, untutored leads; Barnard's layered script; Mike Eley's snow-crisp cinematography that makes the streets of Bradford shine (...) like Ken Loach's Kes, the film kneels with myth: we get a keen sense of an older, purer England buried somewhere underneath all this junk, from the early wide shots of horses in meadows, idling bely-deep in morning mist, to the extraordinary, almost wordless final sequence that hints at redemption and reincarnation. The Selfish Giant is cinema that tells an unsure nation who we are' - Robbie Collin