Why Bird by Andrea Arnold Stole the Spotlight at Cannes Film Festival

The British director’s fourth to be selected in competition, it’s one of those exceptional films you can't help liking simply for its aspirations which are so authentic and open-minded.

The first minutes reveal everything that follows. A story that gradually conquers us with its growing emotional power. Twelve-year-old Bailey lives with her father and brother in a squat in North Kent. The father (Barry Keoghan), inked from head to toe, so young he could be her brother, has plans: he’s getting married, and he’s also peddling a hallucinogen drawn from the sweat of toads imported from Colorado. Bailey’s brother, meanwhile, is preparing to run away to Scotland with his pregnant, 14-year-old girlfriend.

Bailey seeks escape out on the Kent flats, and in her vivid imagination. She has A poetic soul, a passion for nature, filming birds, butterflies, and horses with her iPhone, but she also records the daily violence around her. One day, she meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), a stranger who is looking for his family and who offers her a glimpse of another way of living.

‘Bird’ fits into the filmmaker’s playground: the social chronicle, the coming of age story, the kid that has to cope with absent or failing parents, all with an impeccable Brit-rock soundtrack that perfectly connects with the story. She draws wonderful performances from a stunning cast of newcomers and investigate the lives of her characters with tenderness and humanity, an empathy whoever they might be, no matter what they might have done. In Andrea Arnold’s portrait of youth, there is no shame, or judgment but beauty.

As with her previous films, Arnold’s attention is trained on the fringes of society, concerned with poverty, social alienation. She digs into social truths with a striking visual sense, offering a critique in which it becomes apparent the system is beyond repair. In ‘Bird’ violence against women is present more than ever. In the post-industrial landscapes of working-class Britain, the only hope is the rebellious youth. They are the reality to which our government stays blind. An army of young single parents and abandoned teenagers, without regular employment and no prospect of a life of dignity. They are innocents, heroes, brim-full of energy and imagination—responsibility lies in the hands of politicians, snobbish politicians, trapped within capitalistic dynamics, unable to “see” and provide an appropriate legislation.

Honest, vivid, and compelling, Bird is rooted in the tradition of “stark” British social realists like Ken Loach and Alan Clarke, to which Arnold brings something new and fresh. An uncompromising, moving fable that you can’t stop thinking about.