Film - Thirteen - Trailer Streams

From a first-time director and two teenage actresses comes a raw and revealing insight into urban adolescence in 2003, a provocative portrait of what teens today are thinking, doing, feeling and going through. Winner of the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Catherine Hardwicke’s THIRTEEN is a unique project co-written with then-13-year-old Nikki Reed who lived many of the events seen on screen. Together, they forged a fast-and-furious, unblinking picture of the cliques and clashes, hidden dangers and secret rituals, dashed hopes and unrelenting dreams of two American girls looking to make their way in a new world for which few maps exist.

What does it mean to be thirteen right now? It has always been the age when establishing identity, individuality and a sense of one’s importance in the world become the imperative. But in today’s America, the pressures on 13-year-old girls – media-fueled expectations to be sexy, gorgeous, cool and in control – have never been greater. Low-rider jeans, body piercing and petty crimes have become the outward symbols of a generation that is desperately trying to find its own spirit.

Hardwicke explores this territory with honesty, clarity and passion in THIRTEEN, using a hyper-kinetic camera to capture both the unhinged joy and high angst of hitting modern adolescence full force. The story follows the transformation of Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), who begins as a promising, pig-tailed student still playing with teddy bears and Barbie dolls. But when Tracy enters the hyper-sexualized peer-pressure cooker of junior high, she witnesses the power and hipness of Evie Zamora (Nikki Reed, co-writer of the script), who has become widely known as “the hottest chick in school.” Ultra-popular, model-gorgeous and bewitchingly snobby, Evie represents everything Tracy suddenly wants, and needs, to be.

At first Tracy has no hope of being accepted into Evie’s elite clique. She’s got the wrong attitude, the wrong friends, definitely the wrong look. But Tracy learns to remake herself, step by step, into the ultimate ideal of a 2003 teen. She discovers how to do the makeup, the clothes, the hair, the act.

She cracks the code of popularity, gains Evie as a mercurial best friend, and even starts winning attention from boys. And yet, the further Tracy dives into premature adulthood, the higher the stakes get. She loses the closeness she once had with her hard-working mother (played by Oscar-winner Holly Hunter), starts failing classes, and despite her seething hatred of her mother’s ex-addict boyfriend (Jeremy Sisto), becomes a drug abuser herself. Despite it all, Tracy is still THIRTEEN, caught in a whirlwind of emotion in which everything she does, everything she says, all that she wants, seems to matter in a huge way. And...she still has her whole life in front of her.

THIRTEEN marks Catherine Hardwicke’s feature film
directorial debut. The screenplay was written by Hardwicke & Nikki Reed. Starring Holly Hunter, Evan Rachel Wood, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto, Brady Corbet and Deborah Kara Unger, the film is produced by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Michael London. The executive producers are Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Liza Chasin & Holly Hunter.

Release Date 5th December 2003
Distributor: UIP
Cert: 18
Running time: 95 mins