The Selfish Giant

The Selfish Giant

The Selfish Giant was released on 25^th October 2013 with a star rating of 7.4 lasting 91 minutes with an age rating of 15. Clio Barnard both directed and wrote the film with the film starring Connor Chapman, Shaun Thomas and Sean Gilder. 

Making

The Selfish Giant is a tale about a 13 year old called Arbor and his best friend Swifty.  Arbor is foul-mouthed and has anger issues. They were excluded from school and were outsiders in their own neighbourhood, the two boys meet Kitten who is a local scrap dealer and the boys begin to collect scrap metal for him using a horse and cart. However, when Arbor challenges Kitten by becoming greedy and dishonest the tension starts to build. This leads to tragic event which transforms them all. It emphasises unemployment life and why there is ferocious competition in the scrap business, with the boy’s mothers struggling with rent the police and social services are continually turning up at their doors. They are unable to pay their utility bills and are reduced in to selling their own furniture to enable them to survive. This emphasises the smack head and drunkards in which violent is undertaken, Arbor represents this in the playground and most terrifyingly in Kitten’s yard. 

Barnard does look for humour and lyricism, however, the boys are an odd couple, one is small and scrawny and the other is very big but they do stick up for each other. 

The film is inspired by the Victorian fairy-tale of the same name by Oscar Wilde. The characters of The Selfish Giant are based on people Barnard met which researching The Arbor in and around Buttershaw in an estate in Bradford. The research involved Barnard meeting a 14 year old boy called Matty who had been scavenging mental to sell to scrap dealers from the age of 11. Matty had built a makeshift stable in his mum’s council house garden which is where is kept his horse who would pull his cart for the scrapping. Matty could make up to £200 a day when scrap prices are high but his business was threatened when the local council threatened his family’s tenancy is the stable wasn’t taken down. By his research Barnard combined these two contradictory genres, fairy tales and social realism to make the tale of The Selfish Giant. 

This trailer gives an insight of the semantics within The Selfish Giant. 

The Guardian referred Barnard’s film as heartfelt and passionate, fluent and supremely confident. The Telegraph connoted Barnard’s film as so skin-prickling alive so it does make the audience want to watch it. MOVIEmeter