• UK release date – 25th Oct 2013
• Production companies: BFI Film Fund/ Film4/ Moonspun Films
• Budget - £1.4 million
• British
• Drama
• Written and directed by Clio Barnard
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Exhibition:
The first exhibition was on the 16th May 2013 Cannes Film Festival in France.
Shortly after its UK release, it could be seen in the following cinemas (mostly in or around London):
News paper reviews:
The film won an award at the Cannes Film Festival from Label Europa Cinemas. it has also been nominated for other awards such as best film also Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas have been nominated for Best British Newcomer.
Positive Quotes From Reviews:
"BRITAIN HAS FOUND A NEW DIRECTOR TO BE PROUD OF."
- Kate Muir,The Times
"ASTONISHINGLY STRONG PERFORMANCES....CINEMA THAT TELLS AN UNSURE NATION WHO WE ARE."
- Robbie Collin,Daily Telegraph
Here are the Distributors of the film and some of the other films they have distributed:
• Cineart (2014) (Netherlands) (theatrical) - Slum-dog millionaire
• Pyramide Distribution (2013) (France) (theatrical) - The Untouchable
• Sundance Selects (2013) (USA) (theatrical) - The Incident
• Front Row Filmed Entertainment (2014) (United Arab Emirates) (all media) (Middle East, North Africa & Iran) - Rush
• Rialto Distribution (2013) (Australia) (all media) - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• Rialto Distribution (2013) (New Zealand) (all media) - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
British Board of Film Classification
THE SELFISH GIANT
Type of media Film
Approved Running time 90m 43s
Release date 25/10/2013
BBFCInsight Contains strong language, once very strong.
Genre(s) Drama
Director(s) Clio Barnard
Cast includesConner Chapman, Shaun Thomas, Sean Gilder, Lorraine Ashbourne, Ian Burfield, Steve Evets
Cut This work was passed uncut.
15
THE SELFISH GIANT is a contemporary drama about two boys who get caught up in the illegal world of metal theft.. It is rated 15 for strong language, once very strong.
There are over seventy uses of strong language ('f**k' and variants) and one use of very strong language ('c**t') which is used by a young boy as a term of endearment to his younger best friend. There are also uses of discriminatory language ('spaz', 'retard' and 'pikey') which are not condoned.
The film also contains a brief image of charred human remains, scenes of moderate violence without detail and one scene of threat to a child. There are also passing drug references ('smackhead', 'spooning') sight of adults smoking and children drinking alcohol.
THE SELFISH GIANT also includes some scenes showing children involved in potentially dangerous activities but the consequences of such behaviour are made clear.
No-one younger than 15 may see a 15 rated film in the cinema. No-one younger than 15 may rent or buy a 15 rated video or DVD.
Details
Distributor(s)
Feature
Title Type Runtime Cut Distributor Date Certificate
THE SELFISH GIANT
Video 86m 52s Artificial Eye Film Co. Ltd 14/01/2014 15
Trailer
Title Type Runtime Cut Distributor Date Certificate
THE SELFISH GIANT
FilmTrailer 2m 7s Artificial Eye Film Co. Ltd 16/09/2013
The Selfish Giant Production Notes [written by the makers of the film]
Short Synopsis
THE SELFISH GIANT is a contemporary fable about 13 year old Arbor (Conner Chapman) and his
best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas). Excluded from school and outsiders in their own
neighbourhood, the two boys meet Kitten (Sean Gilder), a local scrapdealer – the Selfish Giant.
They begin collecting scrap metal for him using a horse and cart. Swifty has a natural gift with
horses while Arbor emulates Kitten – keen to impress him and make some money. However, Kitten
favours Swifty, leaving Arbor feeling hurt and excluded, driving a wedge between the boys. Arbor
becomes increasingly greedy and exploitative, becoming more like Kitten. Tensions build, leading to
a tragic event, which transforms them all.
The Writer/Director and her inspiration for the film
When Clio Barnard was researching her multi award-winning 2010 film, The Arbor, about Bradford
playwright, Andrea Dunbar and her daughter, Lorraine, she did some workshops in a local school. There she met a volatile and charismatic 14 year old, Matty. He stayed for a while then left but reappeared when Clio was working on the Buttershaw estate where The Arbor is set – always in rigger boots, fixing something. Later when she was shooting there his horse was on the set. Usually Matty would help by moving the horse and once or twice he rode it right through the middle of the set.
As Clio got to know him and his family, she discovered he’d been scrapping – scavenging for metal to sell to scrap dealers - from the age of 11. Matty had a best friend and it was this friendship that inspired the emotional core of The Selfish Giant. So the characters of Arbor and Swifty were born.
Matty had built a makeshift stable in his Mum’s council house garden to keep his horse who would pull his cart for scrapping. With scrap prices going up, he could earn as much as £200 on a good day. But Matty’s Mum was threatened with losing her council house tenancy if the stable wasn’t taken down. After the stable went, Matty kept and grazed his horse as he could and his story of scrapping and horses built the core of the film’s narrative. Matty himself was very opposed to illegal drugs because of their effects in his family and this, in turn, inspired the story strand about Arbor’s half-brother, Martin. Matty himself had ADHD – a hyperactive disorder causing angry fits and treated with Ritalin which, in the wrong hands, finds its way onto the black market as ‘kiddie coke’.
Clio had long wanted to do an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale that gives the film its name – The
Selfish Giant. In that story, the Giant excludes the children from his garden so they have nowhere to
play. Clio had seen the way children on these Bradford estates had been excluded – marginal in
marginalized communities and with little future on the edges of a declining, deindustrialized economy.
She wanted to explore their exclusion but she couldn’t figure out who the Giant was in her own story until she learnt more about the scrapyards and their owners. Whilst most scrapyards operate within heavily regulated rules designed to reduce metal theft, she found out about smaller, less regulated yards and wondered about the ambivalence of these people – were they giving these scrapping kids opportunities or were they exploiting them? Then she had her Giant, who she named Kitten, (a nickname she picked up on whilst researching ‘The Arbor’).
Another strand of the story, about the racing of horses and 2 wheel carts called sulkies had interested
Clio before she began to think about the film. She’d already been a spectator at these dawn races on the motorway and they began to take their place in the narrative.
Website of Artificial Eye (UK distributor)
Website of Moonspun Films
The Selfish Giant has been nominated for a BAFTA for Outstanding British Film 2014.
To date The Selfish Giant has won the following prestigious awards:
Cannes Film Festival - Europa Cinema Label for Best European Film
Stockholm Film Festival - Best Film
Dinard Film Festival - Le Hitchcock D’Or Award for Best Film, Prix "Coup de Coeur" & Prix de l’image (Best Cinematography)
St Jean de Luz film festival - Grand Prize
Hamptons International Film Festival - GSA Award
Ghent Film Festival - Grand Prix
AFI Festival - New Auteur Audience Award & New Auteur Award for Direction
Lux Prize Finalist
BIFA Award - Technical Achievement for Casting
To date The Selfish Giant has been nominated for the following awards:
BAFTA - Outstanding British Film
South Bank Sky Arts Awards - Best Film
London Critics Circle - Best British Film, Best Newcomer - Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas
LFF - Best Film and Best Newcomer - Conner Chapman, Shaun Thomas
BIFA - Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Newcomer, Best Achievement in Production, Best Technical Achievement
Artificial Eye to distribute The Selfish Giant in the UK & Ireland. UK theatrical release: 25th October 2013.
The film is being screened at the following cinemas: Curzon Soho, Curzon Renoir, Curzon Richmond, HMV Curzon Wimbledon, Phoenix East Finchley, Greenwich Picturehouse, Screen on the Green, Everyman Hampstead, Hackney Picture house, Ritzy Brixton, Rio Dalston, Tricycle Kilburn, Manchester Cornerhouse, Bradford Pictureville, DCA, IFI, Edinburgh Filmhouse, Bristol Watershed, Sheffield Showroom, Nottingham Broadway, Glasgow Film Theatre, Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, Newcastle Tyneside, Brighton Duke of Yorks, Leeds Hyde Park
Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s 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.
The Selfish Giant is backed by the BFI Film Fund and Film4, and was developed with support from both Film4 and the BFI. International sales are being handled by Protagonist Pictures. Shooting took place in Bradford for six weeks.
The Selfish Giant is a contemporary fable about 14-year-old Arbor (Conner Chapman) and his best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas). Excluded from school and outsiders in their own community, the boys meet Kitten (Sean Gilder), a local scrapman, and begin collecting scrap metal for him using a horse and cart. Swifty has a natural gift with horses and Arbor has a business brain and a way with words – they make a good team. But when Arbor begins to emulate Kitten by becoming greedy and exploitative, tensions build, leading to a tragic event which transforms them all irrevocably.
The Selfish Giant is writer/director Clio Barnard’s second film, following on from The Arbor, her feature-length documentary film about Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. The Arbor received huge critical success on its release in 2010 and numerous awards including The Douglas Hickox Award at the British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs), Best Screenplay at the Evening Standard British Film Awards, Best British Newcomer at the BFI London Film Festival, Best New Documentary Filmmaker at Tribeca and The Grierson Award for Best Cinema Documentary.
Barnard based her adaptation of ‘The Selfish Giant’ on stories she was told and people that she met whilst making The Arbor. She got to know a group of boys between the ages of 10 and 16 who used horses and carts to collect scrap metal, and in particular one boy who was the basis of the character of Arbor in the film. Barnard describes her second feature film as “a re-telling of a fairy tale based on fact”.
The Selfish Giant – Guardian review
Clio Barnard's social-realist tale of a teen scrap scavenger goes at it like a supercharged Ken Loach – and packs in Bradford's answer to Ben-Hur to boot
Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian, Thursday 24 October 2013 14.38 BST
Crusading social realism may have long since ceased to be fashionable in Britain's theatre and television drama, but in the cinema the flame stubbornly continues to burn. In recent years, these films have often come visually supercharged with a new painterly grandeur – a kind of Loach 2.0.
Directors like Amma Asante, Sally El Hosaini and Tina Gharavi have contributed to this continuing British movie tradition; Andrea Arnold has had sensational successes with her movies Red Road, Fish Tank and a brilliant and much-misunderstood version of Wuthering Heights. Now Clio Barnard has shown her own mastery of the form with an outstanding new film, a contemporary reworking of the story by Oscar Wilde. Having watched it again, the minor qualifications I had when I first saw it at Cannes earlier this year have been blowtorched away by its sheer passion – and by the two leading performances.
Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas play Arbor and Swifty, two lads who live in the tough estates of Bradford, leading an almost bucolic existence of hand-to-mouth survival. Arbor is small, aggressive, unhappy. His mate Swifty is slower and gentler and almost beatific, a natural target for bullies. Arbor gets in a fight defending Swifty in the playground, and the resulting chaos gets both boys excluded, a development they welcome so that they can pursue their true vocation: roaming around town scavenging and nicking metal objects so they can sell them for scrap. To do this, the children must take their swag to a dodgy dealer, inappropriately nicknamed Kitten, and played by Sean Gilder.
Just as Wilde's giant lived in perennial winter in his walled garden, glowering Kitten rules over a grim scrapyard with high fences: a factory of ill-health and unsafety. He is also at the centre of an illegal and fantastically dangerous drag-racing scene on public roads with the horses and traps used for his work. A natural predator and exploiter, Kitten sees that sweet-natured Swifty has a talent for handling horses and could be a star rider for him: as for poor Arbor, his metier is the dangerous business of stealing cable from railway lines and electricity stations. Arbor and Swifty look like Laurel and Hardy. Kitten calls them Cheech and Chong.
Since this film first appeared, the director has indicated that it should not be read too closely in tandem with the literary original, and that this was effectively a starting-off point. This is true enough. And yet the film's heartstopping denouement will make less sense without a knowledge of Wilde's story and his Christian imagery of the stigmata. You have to make the connection between that and the secular, godless world of Barnard's movie, you have to trace its Christ-shaped hole – and furthermore, to wonder which of the characters is the "giant" – to appreciate the film's voltage and to understand its tragedy.
It's weird to praise something like this for its stunts and non-CGI action sequences, but Barnard's "drag race" scene is superb: a hair-raising Brit-realist Ben-Hur. Two lads piloting horse-drawn traps hurtle down a public road at dawn. Behind them is a crazy flotilla of gamblers in cars with screaming horns, leaning out to get a YouTube video of the race on their phones, aggressively sideswiping each other, and naturally trying to spook the opponent's horse so he crashes. These are the kings of deprivation, and this is their sport. Another sort of director might have made it the finale, but Barnard places it elsewhere in the story and coolly shows that in this race there are only losers.
The Selfish Giant has Ken Loach's Kes in its DNA; Chapman looks eerily like the young David Bradley in some scenes, and Sean Gilder is a grisly, ironic, unfunny reincarnation of Brian Glover's PE teacher: a father figure who can only destroy. I would also compare it to Loach's The Navigators. The Selfish Giant does not have the formally innovatory quality of Barnard's previous work The Arbor, the "verbatim cinema" experiment that made her name, but the direct humanity and sympathy here signal her maturity as a film-maker, particularly in the handling of the two young leads. There is enormous pathos in the way Thomas traces Swifty's ascent from protected to protector; as well as in Conner Chapman's scrappy, wounded defiance and in the exquisite insolence he shows to the two coppers who come round to give him a warning: he demands that they remove their shoes in the house. It is a richly allusive and moving work. And Barnard's own stature isn't in doubt.
BFI - Film of the week: The Selfish Giant
Clio Barnard joins the ranks of British cinema’s child’s-eye realists with a lyrical portrait of young rebellion in England’s green and wasted land.
Jonathan Romney
from our November 2013 issue
Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant bears a tenuous relation to the Oscar Wilde children’s story that inspired it – so tenuous that the director admits she thought of changing the title entirely. The giant of her story is the exploitative and potentially violent scrap dealer Kitten – who at one point threatens to put teenager Arbor’s arm through a wire stripper – and his garden is the scrapyard, a field of recycled, often stolen, metal.
Kitten’s yard embodies the malaise of a dismantled industrial society in which nothing new is made but everything is available to be picked, stolen, scavenged: a selfish economy in which everything is potentially worth a bob or two (the theme gets a sourly comic spin when the father of Arbor’s best friend Swifty sells his sofa from right under his numerous children).
Thankfully, Wilde’s mawkish tale of renewal and redemption doesn’t haunt the film too obviously, although elements echo faintly. The Christ Child who haunts the Giant’s garden, with stigmata on his hands and feet, here becomes the martyred Swifty, whose death prompts Kitten to hand himself over to the police. It’s arguably only the residual trace of the Wilde story that entirely makes sense of Kitten’s surprisingly sudden and open redemption.
But The Selfish Giant isn’t best approached as an experiment in recycling a familiar text (narrative scavenging, as it were). The film is a return to the Bradford setting of Barnard’s debut feature The Arbor (2010), in which actors lip-synched to documentary testimonies about local playwright Andrea Dunbar.
Despite its reworking of an incongruous pre-text, however, The Selfish Giant shares little of The Arbor’s overtly experimental motivation. Instead, this essay in lyrical realism belongs in a very familiar British tradition that connects such films as Kes (1969), Ratcatcher (1999), Sweet Sixteen (2002) and Fish Tank (2009) – depictions of the immediate conditions of social deprivation from the point of view of children and teenagers.
Having chosen to pitch her stall this time directly on the royal road of British art cinema, Barnard nevertheless brings a distinctive poetic spin to her material, making the film as much a study of the porous boundary between town and country as Kes was. There’s a strikingly eerie ruralist magic to the repeated shots of horses standing on horizons at night – Barnard and DP Mike Eley make strong, often stylised use of horizontals, including the frame of the bed that Arbor sometimes hides under (his own arbour, perhaps?). There’s an extraordinary shot late in the film of a landscape that bears the marks of post-industrial disuse, the land and vegetation taking on the look of fatigued, rusted metal, evocative of the inert mineralisation afflicting a world once organic.
The organic forces in the film (in the terms of Wilde’s story, the endurance of irrepressible life to make England’s dead garden bloom) are represented by the two boys and by Kitten’s horse Diesel. The racing with traps, or two-wheeled ‘sulkies’, is a phenomenon that will be familiar to viewers of the underrated Eden Valley (1995), by the Newcastle-based Amber Collective. In Barnard’s film the theme provides an almost autonomous sequence of explosive energy, in which sulkies race down the road followed by a flotilla of trucks carrying cheering spectators.
As for the film’s two young leads, their relationship – a little-and-large duo echoing Of Mice and Men, although the ostracised Swifty is more astute than his persecutors think – is the core of compassion and solidarity in a harsh world. Sentiment only creeps in at the very last moment, in a shot in which the dead Swifty seemingly reappears to clasp hands with Arbor under his bed, but otherwise the rapport between the two boys has a boisterous, prosaic ease.
Like Billy Casper in Kes, Arbor embodies the capacity of the young soul to endure society’s best attempts to crush it – and seeing him shin up a lamp post carries echoes of Billy’s scrawny athleticism in the Loach film. The school here may not be as mechanically soul-destroying as Billy’s, but for all the liberalism it espouses there’s an antiseptic, bureaucratic deadness about its shiny corridors, while cheerful placards in the classroom urging ‘Be Positive’ come across as empty sloganeering. And the school does, after all, entirely give up on the boys.
Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas are terrific fresh finds for Barnard, and the film is a triumph in the direction of young untried actors. Thomas’s less demonstrative role shouldn’t blind us to the depth of emotive power that he finds in the quietly tenacious, ethically stalwart Swifty, while Chapman is one of those force-of-nature young talents (as David Bradley was in Kes, and Katie Jarvis in Fish Tank) who seem to find their personal apotheosis in one perfect role, whether or not they have screen futures ahead of them.
Arbor’s perfect, irrepressible defiance emerges in a superb moment in which this pugnacious shrimp of a lad, possibly destined for a successful entrepreneurial career on one side of the law or another, welcomes police officers to his house with a peremptory bark of “Shoes – off!”
For a very different review, go to :
http://www.thelondonfilmreview.com/film-review/review-selfish-giant/
