Stella Does Tricks

Stella Does Tricks is a 1996 British drama film directed by Coky Giedroyc, written by A. L. Kennedy, and starring Kelly Macdonald as Stella, a Glaswegian teenager working as a prostitute in London who tries to escape her pimp and the memory of her abusive father.^{1 • 2} It was Giedroyc's debut feature, produced by the British Film Institute with Channel Four Television, Compulsive Films, and Sidewalk Productions.^{3 • 4}

Production and release

Coky Giedroyc came to the film from a background in documentaries, pop promos, and arts programs for British television; Stella Does Tricks was her first feature, produced by the BFI.⁴ The screenplay was written by the Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy, and the crew included cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, editor Budge Tremlett, and composer Nick Bicât.^{1 • 10} The production companies were the British Film Institute, Channel Four Television, Compulsive Films, and Sidewalk Productions, with additional funding listed from the Scottish Film Production Board and the Arts Council of Scotland.^{3 • 6}

The film was made in 1996 but reached British cinemas in 1998. A January 1998 Tribune article noted that 40 percent of British films made in 1996 had not yet had a cinema release, and that the delay had improved Stella Does Tricks' commercial chances by letting it be read alongside The Full Monty rather than Trainspotting.⁸ The British Board of Film Classification passed the cinema version, running 98 minutes 31 seconds, with an '18' certificate on 3 October 1997 for the theme of teenage prostitution, drugs, strong language, and violence; a 94-minute 6-second version was classified for home entertainment on 22 December 1998.⁵ It screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 1997 and was distributed in Austria by Constantin-Film.^{9 • 10}

Style and themes

The film scholar Jonathan Murray, whose work on the film appears in the Directory of World Cinema: Scotland (2015), describes constant, calculated shifts in narrative register (reality versus fantasy), timeframe (present versus past), and location (London versus Glasgow) that distance the film from the classically naturalistic mode of much contemporary Scottish and British social realist cinema.⁷ Murray reads the film through a Dickensian reference point: the exploitation of children and narcotic abuse in its London recall Oliver Twist, while Stella herself is pointedly not a sentimental heroine in the mold of Little Nell.⁷

The Melbourne festival synopsis calls the film "a distinctively Glaswegian blend of deadpan comedy, poetic realism and the unexpected," and notes that Stella manages a giggle about sex with her fellow sex workers despite the attentions of pimps and thugs.⁹ ACMI's catalog description credits Giedroyc's television documentary and realist-drama background for the film's frank handling of its subject and its sense of outrage and urgency.³

Reception

Critics were divided on the film's structure but largely agreed on its lead performance. Time Out found Kelly Macdonald impressive in the lead but criticized A. L. Kennedy's script, clumsy flashbacks, and what it saw as an overall prurience, singling out a gang-rape scene.¹¹ The Eye for Film review praised Macdonald as "wonderful" while judging that the fantasy sequences did not work and the childhood flashbacks were too predictable.¹² The film critic Adrian Martin, writing in 1998, called the film "the apotheosis of British miserabilism" and criticized its flashback structure, though he placed it within a late-1990s cycle of films taking a Gothic view of female sexuality and identity.¹³ Variety, quoted by the sales agent Hanway Films, called it "tough but tender, and kaleidoscopic in its emotions" and praised Macdonald's "eye-popping, confident performance".¹⁴

Place in Scottish cinema

By Murray's account, when Stella Does Tricks was released in British cinemas in 1998 it was only the second Scottish-themed and Scottish-financed fiction feature directed by a woman, following Margaret Tait's Blue Black Permanent (1993).⁷ He argues the film represented a pioneering step in the later growth of female-authored and female-centered Scottish filmmaking after 2000, in works such as Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar (2002) and Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2006).⁷ A thesis survey of 1990s Scottish cinema likewise lists it among the very few films of the decade to explore gender outside the frame of Scottish masculinity.¹⁵ Giedroyc's second feature, Women Talking Dirty (2000), followed.¹⁶

References

1. Stella Does Tricks (1996) – Full cast & crew, IMDb
2. Stella Does Tricks – BFI Player Classics
3. Stella does tricks – ACMI collection
4. Coky Giedroyc crew biography, Greatest Days production notes
5. Stella Does Tricks – BBFC
6. Producing the Goods? (UK film production data table)
7. Jonathan Murray, "Stella Does Tricks," Directory of World Cinema: Scotland (2015), University of Edinburgh
8. "Stella Does Tricks," Tribune, 30 January 1998
9. Stella Does Tricks – MIFF Festival Archive
10. Stella Does Tricks – Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival)
11. Stella Does Tricks – Time Out film review
12. Stella Does Tricks – Eye for Film review by Angus Wolfe Murray
13. Stella Does Tricks – Adrian Martin film review (April 1998)
14. Stella Does Tricks – Hanway Films
15. E. Torricelli, Projecting the Nation, PhD thesis, University of York (2016)
16. British Council UK Films Database – Coky Giedroyc projects

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films late 1990s › Released 1995 to 1998

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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