The Selfish Giant Film Analysis

The Selfish Giant Dir. Clio Barnard (2013)

The Selfish Giant was directed by Clio Barnard, it was produced by the British Film Institute, Film 4 and Moonspun Films. It was filmed in Bradford, England.

Clio Barnard is a British director of documentary and feature films. She won widespread critical acclaim and multiple awards for her debut, The Arbor, an experimental documentary about Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. In 2013 she was hailed as a significant new voice in British cinema for her film The Selfish Giant, which premiered in the Director's Fortnight section of the Cannes film festival.

Her debut feature, The Arbor (2010) won several awards including Best New Documentary Filmmaker at Tribeca Film Festival New York, Best Newcomer and Sutherland Awards at The London Film Festival, Douglas Hickox Award at British Independent Film Awards, The Guardian First Film Award, Best Screenplay at the London Evening Standard Film Awards, the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival Innovation Award and the Jean Vigo Award for Best Direction at Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival. She was nominated for the BAFTA Outstanding Debut Award in February 2011.

The film has a cyclic narrative to it as it ends in a similar way to how it starts. The film starts with Arbor under a bed, shouting, screaming and hitting the underside of the bed, until Swifty gets down and give Arbor his hand and they grab hands and it calms Arbor down and almost reassures him leading him to come out from under the bed.. The film comes to an end with the audience seeing Arbor laying under the bed refusing to come out from under the bed,he then imagines seeing Swifty get off the bed and reach his hand out again to reassure him and let him know everything will be alright, then Swifty's mum comes into the room with Arbor's mum and Arbor jumps out from under the bed and gives her a long hug to share her grief and almost give her a hug as an apology for what happened. 
The cyclic structure of the film could also connote what its like to live in poverty, its a never ending cycle that you cannot break, once you having been taking in you cannot leave it.

The film shows poverty in the UK and especially what it is like from a child's perspective. There are many power stations, chimneys and pile-ons shown throughout the film which foreshadows what will happen at the end of the movie. The ‘selfish giants’are the pile-ons and power stations as they took away Arbour’s ticket out from poverty. Swifty had a trait, that allowed him to get on with horses so he could help train and race them. This could have provided Swifty and Arbour with lots of money had the horses of won and they could of eventually taken their families out of poverty ridden Bradford so they could start a new life somewhere else. The adults are also the selfish giants in the film, for example Kitten, the scrapyard owner was selfish because he was getting Arbor ans Swifty to go and steal and salvage scrap metal to make him money. The parents are selfish giants in a way because if we take Swifty's dad for example, he was verbally abusive and took away from the family even though he done it to try and provide for them.

Barnard places a metaphor in the film that runs throughout the film that becomes more noticeable throughout the film that emulates the world that the protagonists live in. The copper wiring is used to represent Arbor and Swifty while the casing around the wiring represents the world of poverty that they have been brought up in. The wiring being taken out of the casing represents Arbor and Swifty staking their claim in a world without poverty,but the casing representing the poverty of the world they live in soon becomes the catalyst that changes their lives forever and prevents them from making it out of poverty.