Fish Tank analysis

Saira Begum

Fish tank

This film is about a teenage girl who lives a hard family life with her single Mother, younger sister and her Mother’s boyfriend. Her mother is very selfish, hard partying and careless with her children as we discover this later in the film.  Mia's real name is Katie Jarvis (born 22 June 1991) is an English actress, known for her role as Mia Williams in the film Fish Tank. She was spotted by a casting agent, following an argument with her boyfriend at Tilbury Town railway station. Mia 

grows affection for her mother’s boyfriend, who later leaves her family. This is shown through their performance and mis-en-scene.  The genre used in this film was Drama, as it was based on reality and real life problems of people in our society. Furthermore, this film is based on social realism, which means this film is based on British society. The types of themes expressed in this film was innocence and vulnerability- this is often shown by Mia as she is very young, expressing her vulnerability to the audience  through the way she is being treated at home, also showing how she is being neglected by her mother in some cases, which explains how her upbringing isn’t to standard. Mia is represented as a young, urban and street smart character. Negligence is also shown through the mis-en-scene, how the damped walls and unordered household show the mother doesn’t take care of herself, let alone her home.

The director of Fish tank, Andrea Arnold used this film to create the underlining meaning of British social realism. The director even used Mia, who never acted before, to star in her film, because they she wanted to focus the film on realism. The director has done this to create meaning, in the film fish tank, the meaning is to show how vulnerable teenagers are lusted and that not all situations have a good ending therefore shows the moral view to the film, and the reality of it in real situations. Comparing it to other films that Arnold made, she makes films based on real life situations.