Beautiful Beings
Tender and raw coming-of-age drama about four Icelandic boys on their sometimes violent path to adulthood. Awarded during the Berlin film festival.
Fourteen-year-old Balli is something of a misfit. He lives with his drug-addicted mother in a squalid house and is bullied by his classmates. A stepfather who ‘thought the gun wasn’t loaded’ has left him with a glass eye. But then Balli meets three boys of his own age – Addi, Konni and Siggi – and a friendship gently develops. For the first time in his life, Balli finds that he is able to connect, especially with Addi.
Icelandic director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson finds poetic images for a world marked by violence and aggression. In BEAUTIFUL BEINGS, he depicts a group of youths who are in danger of foundering on the gender-normative behavioural code of their peer group. Desperately they cling to each other – with a grip that is painful and tender in equal measure. (source: www.berlinale.de)