Bird (OmU)

In the organizer's words:

Twelve-year-old Bailey is forced to find her own way in her poverty-stricken neighborhood, while her father Bug is not interested in raising his children. Instead, Bug spends all his savings on a toad that is supposed to produce a hallucinogen for him in order to free him from poverty. With no support from her father or her mother, who lives with her abusive partner and Bailey's younger siblings, Bailey is on a quest to find beauty in her world. One day she meets Bird, who seems to embody this beauty.

Without falling into kitsch or romanticizing the precarious conditions of the (British) working class in which the film is set, Andrea Arnold and Robbie Ryan's camera raise the question of whether and where there is room for beauty and goodness. Here, social realism and magical realism meet in a unique way.