Clio Barnard has wrapped principal photography on “The Selfish Giant,” which takes its title from Oscar Wilde’s story for children. It is the British artist and director’s second feature following 2010’s “The Arbor,” which I reviewed for Artinfo here.

According to the British Film Institute, which is co-financing the movie with Film4, it “is a contemporary fable about 14-year-old Arbor (Conner Chapman) and his best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas). Excluded from school and outsiders in their own community, the boys meet Kitten (Sean Gilder), 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.”

Barnard’s film could be to the original “Selfish Giant” what Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” was to Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. It sounds like a loose and harshly secular interpretation of Wilde’s Christian parable about the redemptive power of love, which included a socialistic attack on the notion of private property and had a faint homoerotic undertow.

One of five tales published in “The Happy Prince and Other Stories” in May 1888, “The Selfish Giant” was described as “perfect in its kind by Wilde’s mentor Walter Pater, who admired its “beauty and tenderness.”

The story describes the coming of an eternal winter to the giant’s beautiful garden after he expels from it the children who had been happy playing there during his seven-year absence. When the children sneak back and restore summer, the giant realizes he had been selfish. He is moved by the tears of a small boy struggling to climb into a trees and lifts him into it, being rewarded with a hug and a kiss, though the child subsequently disappears.

The giant grows old and feeble. When the boy returns he has stigmata on his hands and feet, revealing he is a Christ-child. The giant wants to slay whoever was responsible, but the boy refuses to let him for “these are the wounds of love.” He rewards the giant for letting him play in his garden by telling he will take him to his garden “which is Paradise.” When the other children come to the garden that afternoon, they find the giant dead and covered with white blossom.

It’s unlikely that any of this symbolic pastoralism will make its way into Barnard’s film, which, like “The Arbor,” was shot (in six weeks) in the working-class Yorkshire city of Bradford. In rawly recounting the tragic life and death of the young Bradford dramatist and screenwriter Andrea Dunbar and the plight of her three children, “The Arbor” harnessed a variety of theatrical and filmic techniques and styles and filtered in documentary footage. Its overall tone was bleak.

For her new film, she drew not only on Wilde’s story, but stories she was told and people she met while making ‘The Arbor." She got to know, the BFI announced, “a group of boys between the ages of 10 and 16 who used horses and carts to collect scrap metal, and in particular one boy who was the basis of the character of Arbor.”

She describes the film as a “re-telling of a fairy tale based on fact.” It should arrive here next year after playing the festival circuit.