just watch it!

Disappointment for a huge fan!

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

While I'm writing this, The Selfish Giant is on Dutch TV. It is one of those British productions which comes so close to realism it makes you wonder if the actors actually exist as people. There isn't much hope in this world a violence and desperation. Even the friendship between the two young outsiders runs into trouble. Adults are mostly brutes, though one broken down mother still tries to give love. This is no easy watching, though the barren city landscape is shown with an eye for Gothic beauty. The camera even sees art in a heap of scrap metal. The two destitute boys with their pony cart for collecting and stealing copper wire and refuse hobbling along on the motorway make the world of people with money and motor cars seem eerily far off. This is what good filming can do. A great addition to the Ken Loach-style of realism and a shocking view on the caste society still alive in England where the poor will always be poor and the rich don't care.

Really hard to start it... Very deep and heartbreaking.It's a realistic British drama showing really detailed the current life of worker class in Bradford - north England, what is still suffering after the 1980's recession and economy collapse. I've never seen any movies putting you up close for such situations just like you can't pay your £20 bill and selling your only furniture. It focuses on the lives of two boys who are both from a large family with awful living conditions. Instead of going to school they prefer to collect scrap metal to help out their family to survive. How ridiculous is it to steal a few kilograms of metal hidden in your jacket from a scrap- dealer isn't it?Absolutely worth to watch, but on a first date. The last ten minutes are really shocking, be prepared for a long never ending catharsis.

The Selfish Giant is in line with the purest British tradition of social cinema à la Ken Loach, relying on classical, overused yet still striking, themes such as poverty, unemployment and the social link.But while the tireless Englishman manages to create a story around those themes and to (relatively) renew himself, Clio Barnard's approach remains very primary. The plot lacks grip and stakes, we've seen the situations a million times before, the characters can't be more typical and ultimately the scenario doesn't offer anything that hasn't been tackled, often in a better way, in other productions. Basically, every characteristic of the genre is excessively emphasized which sometimes gives the impression to be watching a parody.However, the story still does the trick because it is sincere and the good direction coupled with good acting make The Selfish Giant an above average movie yet too banal to really stand out in a saturated genre.

Bradford has not changed one bit, and England neither, even in Yorkshire. At least it has changed since the early 1990s when I visited it regularly. I guess it is not exactly what Oscar Wilde might have imagined though, but we can forget about the nuclear power station: it is not from Wilde's time.The film is so strong that we just can't believe some one has actually tried to produce and direct it. And I am not speaking of the accent. I am speaking of the human relations among the people there in front of our eyes.You have those you hardly ever see. The teachers and school officials who are absolutely locked up in their authority game and in there syllabus targets and their official pedagogy that means detention hall every day, if possible, and humiliation any time you can, till you kick the kids you do not like out of the school for good because you just don't know how to deal with the world the way it is and it is not that gentle and pink sweet.Then you have the coppers and the few times you can catch a glimpse of them, they are very nice, polite, nearly submissive. Do they really do their job of protecting people against danger? Probably not. They protect society against dangerous people, probably, though it looks more like protecting the normal people we never see in the film, those from the good neighborhoods, against the totally marginalized asocial – so they say in the good plush neighborhoods – people of the socially devastated and dilapidated areas of the city. Don't expect to see the cinema, the cathedral, the city hall, the wool exchange of Bradford and I was surprised we had a glimpse at the Queen Victoria Hotel. So what is the interest of the film?To center on kids, boys exclusively, out of primary school and in secondary or comprehensive school, and how they do not want to be treated like children, to be taken to doctors and fed all kinds of drugs to make them play the game of overgrown children. They want to live, to be independent and autonomous. They want to earn a living, in any way possible, even if dishonest. So far so good. These children are not treated, including of course by their fathers, when they have one that is mentionable, the way they should and they are made psychotic more than anything else.The worst part of it though is that from a little theft to a big one there is only one connection to find, and in this case it is a salvage yard managed by someone who is accused of being a Romani, a gypsy if your prefer. He gives them good money for the metal they bring, even if far from what he should give them, and he rips them off and f*** them up or exploits them in all possible ways. But yet he does not hold them, the kids I mean, only with money. He owns horses and he holds them like that: he lends them a draught horse and a cart for their scavenging in the day time and he has a racing horse he entrust to one of the young kids. That magic connection with the horses is what really matters.The end then is absolutely tragic because you cannot steal live copper electric cable if you are not equipped properly. But the best part is after this tragic ending, the way two mothers can manage to salvage the survivor, how the dead kid's mother salvages the survivor. That is so human, so strong that it saves the film, it salvages our disbelief. Yes somewhere on this earth, not very far from us there are children who live that kind of hell on earth and they, some of them at least, manage to survive and grow up into adulthood. Girls have prostitution. Boys have the survival of the fittest and the death of the softest.Such fates are stronger and more powerful than all the possible philosophies of this world, including Buddhism actually.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU