Interesteg What makes it different from others?

Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Cissy Évelyne It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

JohnnyWeissmuller The Selfish Giant takes its name from the Oscar Wilde story, although it bears no relation, being an original story from director Cleo Barnard. Here, centering around the lives of two young Yorkshire boys who are without aspiration, education or a sound family unit. The two young stars of the film, Connor Chapman and Shaun Thomas, play Arbor and Swifty, best friends who spend their days skipping school and getting into further mischief in the streets and fields surrounding the run-down estate in which they live. Arbor, with his drug-addict brother and a mother who can't control them, and Swifty, with his numerous siblings and volatile parents who are so destitute they can't afford electricity to their house or a meal greater than beans and dry bread. By chance, the boys encounter two men stealing copper cable from the railway and, as the men hide from track engineers, the boys take the chance to steal the stolen cable and sell it to local scrap dealer, Kitten, played by Sean Gilder. The boys aspirations to earn some money has them working for Kitten, who abuses their naivety and trust as he pushes them into hard labour with little reward. Especially when Kitten sees Swifty's affinity with horses and an opportunity to win money trap racing on the motorway nearby. Not too far removed from Ken Loach's seminal Kes, The Selfish Giant is kitchen sink cinema with the added realism of people and place, Chapman and Thomas being non- professionals who reside in the area where the film is set, whilst the script and direction are uniformly excellent in a film that is devastatingly powerful and intensely moving.

runamokprods While not audacious and brave in it's style as Barnard's smashing debut "The Arbor", it explores much of the same territory – poverty in northern England. But this time Barnard uses a more neo-realist bent that recalls the films of Ken Loach, among others. And after two viewings, while I missed the wild rule-breaking she did in her first film, I felt she had made a film of gritty honest and emotional force. The story centers on two young teens (very well played by non-pros). Diminutive Arbor is hyperactive, angry, and so on the edge he can be frightening and simultaneously heartbreaking -- Arbor needs meds just to allow him to be calm enough to function. And there's Swifty, his best friend who is introvert to Arbor's extreme extrovert. Swifty is willing to go along with Arbor's schemes to a point, but he also wants to honor his mother's wish that he get an education, and try to move up and out of poverty. The two begin collecting (and sometimes stealing) scrap metal to sell to a tough local junk metal dealer, Kitten. This is a man who is capable of being almost a father figure one moment, and stomping you into the ground the next. A sort of modern Fagan, using the boys to do his bidding (although, to be fair, the boys come to him). A dark, moody and ultimately deeply disturbing film, that refuses to let us or society off lightly when it comes to kids growing up in the cycle of poverty.

snidgeskin The two leads, as unknowns, are superb, as are all the child actors in this.Of the adults it is clearly led by the performance of the three lead female actors (four: I should include the school receptionist). But this film has such an almost documentary feel about it you can forgive any of the acting that may feel a little strained or unnatural (perhaps because of a lacking in the script?).There are some wonderfully emotionally funny scenes equally matched by ones of sadness. People often use words such as grim, depressing or bleak. But this is Britain as it is; which is about looking for the humour and humanity beyond the circumstance of living. If you haven't been in Britain, then you might be forgiven, if you live here then maybe you have been sheltered: This is really how life can be; but it is far more a story about a boy's journey to manhood.As a statement on modern society then it speaks volumes to say that nothing is different now as from when it's 60's counterpart Kes was made, or for that matter in anytime in our history.But for me it won on all levels for it's such strong sense of humanity, on Arbor's journey of discovery, which was lacking, somewhat, in Kes.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Bradford has not changed one bit, and England neither, even in Yorkshire. At least it has changed since the early 1990s when I visited it regularly. I guess it is not exactly what Oscar Wilde might have imagined though, but we can forget about the nuclear power station: it is not from Wilde's time.The film is so strong that we just can't believe some one has actually tried to produce and direct it. And I am not speaking of the accent. I am speaking of the human relations among the people there in front of our eyes.You have those you hardly ever see. The teachers and school officials who are absolutely locked up in their authority game and in there syllabus targets and their official pedagogy that means detention hall every day, if possible, and humiliation any time you can, till you kick the kids you do not like out of the school for good because you just don't know how to deal with the world the way it is and it is not that gentle and pink sweet.Then you have the coppers and the few times you can catch a glimpse of them, they are very nice, polite, nearly submissive. Do they really do their job of protecting people against danger? Probably not. They protect society against dangerous people, probably, though it looks more like protecting the normal people we never see in the film, those from the good neighborhoods, against the totally marginalized asocial – so they say in the good plush neighborhoods – people of the socially devastated and dilapidated areas of the city. Don't expect to see the cinema, the cathedral, the city hall, the wool exchange of Bradford and I was surprised we had a glimpse at the Queen Victoria Hotel. So what is the interest of the film?To center on kids, boys exclusively, out of primary school and in secondary or comprehensive school, and how they do not want to be treated like children, to be taken to doctors and fed all kinds of drugs to make them play the game of overgrown children. They want to live, to be independent and autonomous. They want to earn a living, in any way possible, even if dishonest. So far so good. These children are not treated, including of course by their fathers, when they have one that is mentionable, the way they should and they are made psychotic more than anything else.The worst part of it though is that from a little theft to a big one there is only one connection to find, and in this case it is a salvage yard managed by someone who is accused of being a Romani, a gypsy if your prefer. He gives them good money for the metal they bring, even if far from what he should give them, and he rips them off and f*** them up or exploits them in all possible ways. But yet he does not hold them, the kids I mean, only with money. He owns horses and he holds them like that: he lends them a draught horse and a cart for their scavenging in the day time and he has a racing horse he entrust to one of the young kids. That magic connection with the horses is what really matters.The end then is absolutely tragic because you cannot steal live copper electric cable if you are not equipped properly. But the best part is after this tragic ending, the way two mothers can manage to salvage the survivor, how the dead kid's mother salvages the survivor. That is so human, so strong that it saves the film, it salvages our disbelief. Yes somewhere on this earth, not very far from us there are children who live that kind of hell on earth and they, some of them at least, manage to survive and grow up into adulthood. Girls have prostitution. Boys have the survival of the fittest and the death of the softest.Such fates are stronger and more powerful than all the possible philosophies of this world, including Buddhism actually.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU