A boy holds a secret by a canal, and a garbage strike piles the city’s rubbish into mountains around him, as if the whole world were rotting along with what he carries inside.

RATCATCHER (1999) is set in a working-class Glasgow tenement during the dustmen’s strike of the 1970s, when uncollected trash lined the streets for weeks. Twelve-year-old James Gillespie, played by William Eadie, drifts through this decay carrying guilt over something that happened at the canal, growing distant from his mother, father, and sisters. He finds strange comfort in Margaret Anne, a fourteen-year-old girl used to trading affection for attention, and in Kenny, a gentle neighborhood boy whose tenderness toward small creatures survives everything around him, right up to the pet mouse he ties to a balloon and sends off to the moon.

This was Lynne Ramsay’s debut feature, after her short films had already drawn attention at Cannes. She wrote and directed it herself, working with cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler to find unexpected beauty in half-built houses, a golden wheat field on the edge of town, and the dirty water James keeps returning to.

Tommy Flanagan plays his father. The film premiered at Cannes in 1999, reached American theaters in 2000, and earned Ramsay the BAFTA's Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer in British Film.