To say that Ratcatcher is at once the trashiest and most beautiful movie of the year is a testament to the ambidextrous faculties of its 29-year-old writer/director Lynne Ramsay. Ratcatcher's seamless shifts from the squalid to the whimsical showcase a young director in possession of an astonishingly varied craft.

"I look at a lot of photographs when I'm making a film," confesses the garrulous, thickly accented Ramsay, who attended Britain's National Film and Television School as a cinematography student but turned to directing after realizing she was too diminutive to carry her own equipment. "To be honest, I think being a photographer is far more interesting than being a screenwriter, which is like taking photographs you can never take."

Citing the photography of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Richard Billingham as inspiration for her work, Ramsay, who was recently named Best Newcomer in British Film, demonstrates an eye for the unseen beauty in urban decay. But she owes as much to her photographic roots as she does to her working-class Glasgow upbringing -- she was a child during the 1973 garbage strike that serves as Ratcatcher's setting.

"When I looked at photographs of (the strike), which sort of started the whole project, it was even weirder than I remembered: a city under siege, with garbage piled to the top of goalposts and people living in it and accepting it," Ramsay recalls.

At the film's otherwise bleak core -- which focuses on one boy's efforts to escape the glorified trash heap that is his home -- lies a prevailing sense of youthful exuberance, due in no small part to the adorably scruffy non-professional child actors who help make Ratcatcher the 400 Blows (1959) of its generation.

Ramsay auditioned nearly 1,500 kids from working-class backgrounds, searching for an unaffected type who had never acted before. "One minute you're in despair because you wonder if you can pull it all off," Ramsey sighs. "and the next minute some kid appears and (he's) completely un-self-conscious in front of the camera. Every so often you find a gem." The same can said for Ramsay and the distinct vision she's created in Ratcatcher -- she may not be able to carry camera equipment but there's no denying she can carry a film.

Andy Bailey is a New York-based writer whose work has appeared in Time Out New York, Interview, Dazed & Confused and The Face.