Wild Boy is the story of the education of Amir, the artist’s son. Ben-Ner plays the educator’s part, trying to domesticate the child. Using the metaphor of the wild child is Ben-Ner’s homage to this recurring theme in literature and cinema: from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ « Tarzan » to Truffaut’s « L’enfant sauvage », and Rudyard Kipling’s « Jungle book ».
In his films, Guy Ben-Ner plays with the history of cinema, referring to the experimental origins of silent film, to comic figures such as Keaton and Chaplin, and to Truffaut’s French New Wave...