A contemporary fable about 14-year-old Arbor and his best friend Swifty. Excluded from school and outsiders in their own community, the boys meet Kitten, a local scrapman, and begin collecting scrap metal for him using a horse and cart. Swifty has a natural gift with horses and Arbor has a business brain and a way with words they make a good team. But when Arbor begins to emulate Kitten by becoming greedy and exploitative, tensions build, leading to a tragic event which transforms them all irrevocably.

Clio Barnard is an artist who has been involved in audio-visual works for years. Her works have participated at various international festivals; they have been exhibited in galleries like the Tate Modern and the Tate Britain in London and MoMA in New York, and have been broadcast by the most important English channels, including Channel 4. In 2005 she won the prize created by England's Paul Hamlyn Foundation for emerging artists. The Arbor, her debut feature film, previewed at the Tribeca Film Festival, where Clio Barnard won the Best New Documentary Filmmaker Award.