Spud Trailer (2010)

The trailer for Spud.

John Milton, a.k.a. Spud (Troye Sivan), is a small boy from an ordinary background who wins a scholarship to an elite private school in South Africa.

It’s 1990 and Spud’s Dad (Aaron McIlroy) is not reacting well to the news that Nelson Mandela is going to be released from prison. He thinks the country will be taken over by the Communists. Spud is an only child who is cursed with parents from well beyond the lunatic fringe, and a senile granny.

At his new school full of rich kids, Spud is surrounded by boys with nicknames like Gecko (Jamie Royal), Rambo (Sven Ruygrok), Rain Man (Tom Burne), Boggo (Travis Hornsby), Fatty (Blessing Xaba) and Mad Dog (Josh Goddard), and he has his hands full trying to adapt to his new home. He also has to outwit Pike (Darren Frances) and Devries (Ricky Cruz), two of the older boys who do all they can to get Spud, the scholar and outsider, expelled.

Spud is also taking his first tentative steps along the path to manhood. (The path it seems could be rather a long one). He decides that the only way for him to be accepted and to survive the bullying in this crazy new world is through fame and women. So he auditions for the school play *Oliver!* and gets the lead role. He also throws himself into his emerging love life with Mermaid (Genna Blair) and the femme fatale Amanda (Charlbi Dean).

Through all his adventures, Spud is advised by his eccentric, alcoholic English teacher The Guv (John Cleese), who introduces him to great literature and, despite his own failing marriage, offers relationship advice; his unlikely, sickly friend Gecko - the one boy who is more of an outsider than himself - and his new hero, Luthuli (Lehasa Moloi), the head of house.

Armed with only his wits and his diary, Spud takes us from illegal night swimming to the red-hot furnace of the cricket pitch, from ghostbusting to a catastrophic family vacation. He also invites us into the mind of a boy struggling to come to terms with a strange new world, a boy whose eyes are being opened to love and its perils, the value of true friendship and the complete insanity of life..