It’s grim up north.

Clio Barnard’s follow-up to her brilliant docu-drama, The Arbor, is a film of bleak beauty as she refashions Oscar Wilde’s eponymous story to create a modern fable for our times. The Selfish Giant is a powerful slice of social realism in the vein of early Ken Loach and Shane Meadows that delivers a devastating kick to the stomach.

Set on the sink estates of Bradford and the surrounding wastelands, The Selfish Giant tells the story of two best friends, Arbor, a frustrated and angry young boy and the gentle and sensitive, Swifty. Expelled from school they make money in the scrap metal trade working for the yard manager as he takes advantage of their naivety.

The…

The Times They Are A-Changin’

How well Clio Barnard has realized the gravity of this immortal line and applied it to perfection can be seen in her way of conceiving a novel, modernistic, existentialistic, unforgiving and undeniably real, stark outlook to a character that was established roughly 125 years ago by the visionary Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde’s Selfish Giant was a simplistic yet greatly edifying representation of a section of the human kind who are intrinsically introverted, the character which, as time accrued, gave rose to their misanthropic perception of the world. The reason behind The Selfish Giant’s incapability to harmonize with those around him is his inherent characteristic, that is genuine and ineradicable. But bear in mind, he was…

Travel to any corner of the UK and you find communities seemingly cut off from the economic market as we understand it. An underclass created in a post-Thatcher society accentuated under a Blair government that opened up financial freedom toward a black hole of debt. Now summarised by the phrase 'Broken Britain' coined to label and patronise the real issues that face real families everyday of the week.

Whilst filming The Arbor in Bradford three years ago, director Clio Barnard met a young boy who would prove to be the inspiration for the characters in this, her second release, The Selfish Giant. His scruffy appearance and fierce personality was an insight into the thousands of children living a life on…

Oscar Wilde's story is a fable about a giant who has the most beautiful garden imaginable. In his absence, children walk into it and start playing there, having the time of their lives. When he returns he banishes them from his garden, wanting the place to himself. He even puts up a 'no trespassing' sign. The children are left to find things to do in the grey world outside the garden. Inside, the Giant discovers that both spring and summer have decided to stay out as well, turning the beautiful garden into a cold and miserable place. Only when the children somehow managed to find a way back inside, the giant sees the error of his ways and welcomes the…

It's an incredible balancing act to imbue a gritty slice of life on a moribund Northern sink estate with the air of a universal fable, but this is what Clio Barnard has achieved with The Selfish Giant.

We have seen this time of film many times before - what I suppose could be lazily labelled as misery porn - it's not exactly a secret that there are certain areas of many towns, particularly in the North, that have been practically left to rot in the post-Thatcher wasteland caused by the loss of industry. Having lived in the North all my adult life, I can't help but feel an affinity for these blighted communities (hell, I've lived in one), and I…

I'm not a boy, I do not have ADD, and I'm not from a sinkhole in the UK; and yet "The Selfish Giant" hits home on a very deep level.

I am from a farm in the North American prairies, existential by nature: bleak, windy, lonely, and often, poverty stricken. Large families where kids don't always get the attention they need; harsh landscapes that lead to harsh people, and death, very, very close, always.

Barnard's film is brutally and beautifully honest; it doesn't shy away from grim realities, and for that alone, this director should be praised. She presents us with truth.

The film is also touching in cinematic ways: those shots of power plants in the mist, the power…