Conner Chapman in The Selfish Giant (Sundance Selects)

British director Clio Barnard’s career began as an artist/filmmaker, and her work in video was seen in galleries such as Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2010, she won the London Film Festival’s Best British Newcomer Award and the Tribeca Film Festival’s top documentary prize for her unique feature debut The Arbor. This innovative and emotionally resonant film about the life of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, best known for Rita, Sue and Bob Too! (adapted into a 1987 film), defies genre, blurring the line between fiction and documentary. Barnard’s follow-up, The Selfish Giant, is a more traditional narrative, loosely adapted from Oscar Wilde’s classic children’s tale.

The Selfish Giant opens with Arbor (Conner Chapman) riding on the back of his friend Swifty’s (Shaun Thomas) horse while watching thieves steal cables from the railway lines in the night. Hyperactive 13-year-old Arbor is always alert to an opportunity. When the police arrive and chase the thieves, the boys steal the cables from under their noses and turn a handsome profit cashing the cable in at the local scrap metal yard where the owner, Kitten (Sean Gilder), asks no questions.

Both boys live in impoverished, troubled homes on a housing estate in the northern English city of Bradford. Arbor’s single mother is unable to control his older brother, who steals Arbor’s Ritalin and sells it to fund his own drug habit. Swifty’s bullying father dominates his overcrowded home, abusing his mother (Siobhan Finneran) and intimidating his younger siblings. Money is tight, the electricity is out, and the father sells the sofa for cash almost while the family is still on it.

Stigmatized for his poverty, Swifty is bullied at school. When Arbor defends him, he is expelled and Swifty is suspended, but for Arbor, this is another opportunity. Desperate for a father figure, Arbor looks up to scrap dealer Kitten, despite his ruthlessness. Arbor coerces Swifty to join him scavenging the streets and industrial scrubland to make some real money for his family with Kitten’s rented horse and cart.

While Arbor knows nothing about horses, Swifty has a natural affinity that Kitten recognizes. When Kittens prize horse loses an illegal “sulky” race, a travelers’ tradition in which two-wheeled horse carriages compete along abandoned motorways, Kitten asks Swifty to train and race the horse. Although Arbor’s increased his spoils, Kitten still wants more. Greed and jealousy send Arbor into a destructive rage, and his actions fracture the boys’ friendship. Tragedy looms larger than the cooling towers that litter the post-industrial landscape.

Barnard was inspired by a boy that she met while filming The Arbor, as much as by the classic short story. Like that boy, Arbor and Swifty are isolated and written off by school. Her two young leads, both non-professionals cast from the local Bradford estate, command the screen with a perfect naturalism. As diminutive Arbor, Chapman is a firecracker; explosive, determined, and full of swagger that belies his diminutive frame. Thomas plays his only friend, Swifty, a burly, gentle son who takes on responsibilities his feckless father neglects. It’s wonderful to see Sean Gilder, better known to British audiences for his television role in Shameless, in a feature, and he’s totally convincing as Kitten, the titular giant.

The film is lyrically shot by cinematographer Mike Eley, with a sparing score by Harry Escott. The dour, decaying urban landscapes are contrasted with natural beauty. Horses and sheep graze marginal landscapes shrouded in mist, crisscrossed by electricity pylons.

The Selfish Giant, a portrait of the margins of contemporary British society, is part fable and part verité, indebted to the social realist tradition. In an era of austerity and inequality, it reflects on the selfishness that became an ideology in Thatcherite Britain and continues today. But while the boys’ family circumstances—absent or brutal fathers, struggling mothers—may feel familiar, the relationships that Barnard sculpts are more complex than clichéd. Beneath the parental conflict and frustration, Barnard reveals the boys’ vulnerability. The Selfish Giant is a deeply affecting film and a resounding success.