The Selfish Giant (MA 15+)
Selected cinemas
91 minutes

The north of England, home of bad comedians and worse weather. This is where London filmmakers go in search of authenticity and grime, but there are home-grown voices too. Shane Meadows in Nottingham has made his mark, and then there's… er, um…

The truth is that very few northern filmmakers choose to stay in T’north. Even if they want to, the money is in London. That's why northern voices are rare in British cinema. The other reason is that nobody can understand what they’re saying.

The Selfish Giant upholds that cliche. Filmed around Bradford, it's extremely difficult to decode the dialogue, although it hardly matters. With such powerful storytelling and memorable characters, the film could be in Croatian and still work.

It's the first dramatic feature of Clio Barnard, who grew up in Yorkshire, and now teaches film at the University of Kent. She came to drama after working as a visual artist, and that fine art sensibility helps her find the poetic side of Bradford. Anyone who has seen Bradford will know that is an achievement.

The British critics have rightly compared her to Ken Loach, and especially his 1969 film Kes, about a boy’s love for his pet kestrel. There are many similarities, mostly deliberate, but the film’s main inspiration is local. Barnard was shooting a documentary about the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar when she met a wild 14-year-old boy who had been scrapping – scrounging for scrap metal – since he was 11. She grafted his story onto a free adaptation of Oscar Wilde's children's tale, about a giant who banishes the children from his garden, then regrets the permanent winter that follows.

The giant in this new story is the scrap metal dealer, Kitten (Sean Gilder), an intimidating hard man who buys whatever the misfit teenagers Arbor (Conner Chapman) and Swifty (Shaun Thomas) bring in. Arbor is small and volatile, especially when he forgets to take his Ritalin. Swifty is chubby and sweet-natured, bullied at school because he has seven siblings and a father (Steve Evets) who sells the family furniture while they’re still paying it off. Other kids call them ‘'pikeys'’, a derogatory term for Gypsies.

When they’re excluded from school, the boys take up scrapping. The best way is to steal telecom cable and burn off the casing to reveal the ''bright wire''. They are brazen, because Arbor has rat cunning rather than judgment. He wonders how to get cable from live electrical towers.

The film is shot in observational style, keeping the camera low, which gives a vivid sense of the world these boys inhabit. Between poverty and danger, they will always choose risks, because life offers them few choices. The mothers of both boys (Rebecca Manley and Siobhan Finneran) try their best, against the odds.

Barnard's work with these two child actors is extraordinary, and she has written a lean script. She gives us more room to breathe than Ken Loach might, perhaps because she's interested in the families too. The film is not unrelieved gloom. It's gritty and tragic, but brimming with a strong pulse of life. Barnard keeps us so close to these characters, we can almost feel their breath in the cold northern air. Stunning.

Twitter: @ptbyrnes