Andrea Arnold returns to social commentary with Bird

Following faithfully in British kitchen-sink tradition, for her first two films Andrea Arnold used housing estates as her stages, capturing their innate sense of distress in a naturalist style rooted in the power of her characters. Red Road (Jury Prize, 2006) and Fish Tank (Jury Prize, 2008) are shining examples of the director’s uncanny ability to produce instinctive cinema that uncovers the chaotic circumstances of people burnt by life.

In American Honey, her first film outside the United Kingdom (and awarded the 2016 Jury Prize), Andrea Arnold embarked on an odyssey stretching over several weeks across the southern United States, on a mission to film the shaky, sex- and drug-laced everyday lives of a door-to-door magazine sales crew.

Two years after Cow (2022), her documentary that peeled back the curtain on the day-to-day life of a dairy cow, the British film-maker is back on home turf, returning to social commentary with the story of 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who lives with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) and brother (Jason Buda) in a squat somewhere in the depths of northern Kent.

The drudgery of everyday life is thrown off kilter when she meets Bird, a young man played by Franz Rogowski, who offered up a glimpse of Andrea Arnold’s on-set methods: according to the actor, she would sometimes wait several hours, ‘like a hunter’ to capture the ‘right moment’ without having to tempt fate.