Scrapper

Charlotte Regan's Scrapper won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Dramatic at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where it had its world premiere in January of that year, and went on to a UK release through Picturehouse Entertainment in August. It is the British director's debut feature after a long apprenticeship in commercials and short films, including the BAFTA-nominated Drug Runner. Theo Barrowclough produced and the BFI Film Fund and BBC Film co-financed.

Newcomer Lola Campbell plays Georgie, a twelve-year-old girl living alone on a council estate after the death of her mother and recording fake therapy sessions to keep social services off her back. Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl) is her young, prodigal father Jason, who turns up over the garden fence early in the film. Cinematographer Molly Manning Walker (herself a director, of How to Have Sex) shoots the estate in lurid pop colours; Patrick Jonsson's score and Regan's bursts of stop-motion and direct-address asides keep the film tonally closer to Fish Tank by way of Aki Kaurismäki.

The film's reception was warm across the board: a 91 per cent positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, the European Film Award Young Audience Award, fourteen British Independent Film Award nominations and a place on the National Board of Review's Top Ten Independent Films of the year. The Guardian, Sight & Sound and IndieWire all included it among the best British debuts of the decade. Scrapper stands as one of the most charming small films to come out of the post-pandemic British indie scene.