Andrea Arnold is creating a nice little rèsumè. In 2005 she won an Oscar for a live action short film, Wasp. The next year she was awarded the Jury Prize (the third most prestigious award) at Cannes for her first feature film, Red Road. In 2009, her new film, Fish Tank, also won the Jury Prize. It is a powerful and moving film about Mia, a fifteen-year-old girl from the public housing projects. She lives with her mother and younger sister, but is in many ways on her own. Even other girls her own age have nothing to do with her. She is very much cut off from any meaningful human interaction. And then her mother brings home a new boyfriend that begins to turn her world upside down in a variety of ways.

When Conner comes into her life, she has no trust that he won't abandon her family and her like everyone else. Conner seems like a pretty nice guy. He's kind to Mia and her sister. He doesn't push himself on them, but invites them to join him and their mother in an outing. He encourages her to dance, the way she has worked off some of her anger, even though she's really not very good at it. In time she begins to trust him, only to have that trust abused at the deepest of levels—a betrayal that ramps up Mia's rage to a dangerous level.

The power of the film comes from Katie Jarvis's performance as Mia. Arnold wanted to cast many non-actors in the film, and this is Jarvis's first role. She was discovered by a casting agent who saw her arguing with her boyfriend at a train station. Her performance masterfully shows us Mia's rage and her brokenness. Mia has a tough exterior, but only wants some sense of belonging and love. She even looks for it in an old horse she tries to free from some trailer-dwelling young men she thinks are abusing it.

Dancing is a key metaphor in the film. Whereas dancing is generally considered to be fun and celebrative, for Mia it is both an outlet and an agony. She sees other girls dancing, both for fun and to attract boys, but Mia just can't quite get it right. Her mother dances, and finds a boyfriend. Certainly it seems that Mia must learn to dance to find love, but she discovers that such a route to love is superficial at best.

Thematically I was reminded of the film Thirteen, in which an American teen struggles to find her place in the awkward world of adolescence. But in Thirteen there is love around the central character, even if she has a hard time discerning it. In Fish Tank, Mia yearns for any sense of being loved and is on the verge of giving up all hope that there will be any love in her life. As bleak as her life is, we do get to see at least a chance of hope. Mia has a long way to go to find a chance for healing or happiness in her life, but by the end of the film she has the early stirrings of self-worth that will make it possible for her to love herself enough to be loved by others.