British director Andrea Arnold won the Cannes Jury Prize for the searing and invigorating Fish Tank, about a fifteen-year-old girl, Mia (electrifying newcomer Katie Jarvis), who lives with her mother and sister in the depressed housing projects of Essex. Mia's adolescent conflicts and emerging sexuality reach boiling points when her mother's new boyfriend (a lethally attractive Michael Fassbender) enters the picture. In her young career, Arnold has already proven herself to be a master of social realism (evoking the work of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach), investing her sympathetic portraits of dead-end lives with a poetic, earthy sensibility all her own. Fish Tank heralds the official arrival of a major new filmmaker.
Supplements
All three of Arnold's short films: Milk (1998), Dog (2001), and the Oscar-winning Wasp (2003)
New video interview with actor Kierston Wareing
Interview with actor Michael Fassbender from 2009
Audition footage
Stills gallery by on-set photographer Holly Horner
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