New Boy
A young African boy with a haunting back story starts school in Ireland, and finds out quickly exactly what it means to be the new kid. The film shows the view of Joseph experience of joining a new school where the children are hostile and unwelcoming. This film is very similar to our idea, like Joseph the entire film is shown through his point of view.
Goal: To be as happy like he used to be in Africa.
Obstacle: New school, adapting to a new country. Bullies.
Urgency/Stakes: Dad dying and moving country. Getting beaten up by bullies.
Character: Joseph- The new boy.
Location: School in Ireland. Mainly set in the class room.
Short film written and directed by David Michôd.
Cast: Cy Standen, Lisa Chappell & Joel Edgerton
A kid. His mum and dad. The sex and drugs. And the boy next door who watched the whole thing unravel. The film opens to a very average suburban neighborhood before peeking into one house in particular. The loud and exaggerated sounds of rough sex are heard as the camera moves in on the vacuous face of a teenage boy—our main character. An unseen narrator relates the boy’s predicament: he lives in a home of rough folk, his mom and dad thinking nothing of engaging in boisterous sex in his presence, nor for that matter doing drugs and partying with other men. The narrator reveals himself to be the boy’s neighbor, and muses about the mom’s seeming indifference to the boy inbetween observations about how much he’d like to have sex with the older, permanently panty-clad woman.
The short film thus exists as a meditative elegy, from the neighbor to the boy, and the visuals support the creation of such a mood, using frequent slow-motion to imagine scenes of alienation the boy might have experienced. Yet this empathy is disturbingly buttressed by the sexual fetishization of the mother, as the camera lingers erotically on the body she so frequently flounts in and around the home. Sexual longing on the neighbor’s part is part of his explanation for the boy’s state, yet that means the neighbor must in a way confront his complicity, a feeling if that is expressed in his voice, if not completely registered in his head.
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