Scrapper

“I think there's always something we can learn from children, such as their unusual view of the world and how they deal with problems”, Charlotte Regan said at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where she received the Grand Jury Prize.

In her feature-length debut, 12-year-old Georgie, a London suburban native, faces challenges that would baffle many adults. She lives entirely on her own, pays her bills by stealing bicycles, and tells social services that she is being looked after by her uncle Winston Churchill. This difficult but structured daily life gets disrupted by the appearance of the bright girl's father. Young Jason (played by Harris Dickinson, the star of Triangle of Sadness) comes back from Ibiza after a long absence, and though he doesn't quite know how to do it, he tries to rebuild a relationship with his daughter. The director portrays their uphill struggle with her own mature film language. It captures the empathy towards the characters, so familiar to Charlotte Wells' Aftersun, but also the out-of-the-box, video-style editing and references to British social cinema.