When the 33rd edition of the Portland International Film Festival commences on Feb. 11, it will do so with its usual thing — collect numerous movies from many countries (36 to be exact) and encourage the usual cheers and jeers. A jeer is that there are too many movies; how many of the offerings are worth seeing? And of course the Festival has a vested interest in making each film sound like the greatest thing since the invention of the graphic user interface. A cheer is that in its indiscriminate scooping up of international product from the last year or two, there are usually some real discoveries: Hong Kong actions films and Romanian Renaissance are part of the repertoire.

Among the many movies on offer this year is Fish Tank, a British film by Andrea Arnold, whose previous film, Red Road, was a critical hit. Fish Tank, which is Ms. Arnold’s second feature, won the Jury Prize at the last Cannes Film Festival, and the lead actress, Katie Jarvis, has received ecstatic praise from critics for her debut performance.

Fish Tank is a modern example of what was once called a “kitchen sink” film. The phrases comes not from the idea that the filmmakers have thrown in everything but; rather, it alludes to a grimy realism, meaning that visible were the dirty kitchen sinks normally hidden from the viewer.

It’s interesting that British cinema is associated with kitchen sink realism, as if it were a new thing in the 1950s. British cinema from its beginnings alternated between light comedies and grim tales of real people. Alfred Hitchcock’s first official feature film, The Pleasure Garden, though based on a melodramatic novel, shows components of lower class life and manners with great familiarity, as well as conflicts between different social strata. But it was only with the film It Always Rains on Sunday in 1947 (which recently played at the Film Center as part of a British Noir series) that creative attention seemed to coalesce around ordinary people. Meanwhile, over at Ealing studio, top comic writers and performers were exploring “little England,” ordinary people in fantastical or amusing situations. It Always Rains on Sunday is categorized now as a noir, but at the time it was probably viewed as a crime story in the Graham Greene mode, focusing on tawdry lower-level criminals. Greene’s worldview was influential on both English novels and cinema, and it’s probably one of the biggest but under-heralded influences on noir in both Britain and Hollywood.

Kitchen sink realism was a cross cultural phenomenon, also inhabiting painting (which is where the term came from) and especially theater, where the run of “angry young man” plays beginning with Look Back in Anger, created a virtually interchangeable phrase to describe a particular mood within postwar society. Soon topics like corporate advancement, abortion, and restless youth became common currency within British art cinema.

The main aesthetic impulse of the kitchen sink approach is one of close observation of reality (though reality in movies is always “reality”). This is what Fish Tank sets out to do. It is a character study of Mia, a 15-year-old girl who lives in an Essex housing project. Mia is an angry young woman who lives with her mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), and her equally foul mouthed little sister. Mia has a promising friendship with Liam (Jason Maza), a traveler sort who keeps a horse in an abandoned trailer park near the project, and also one with Connor (Michael Fassbender, of Inglourious Basterds), her mom’s new boyfriend, whom she first likes as a mentor or father figure until things turn strange.

Anyone who has seen a film by the Belgian brothers the Dardennes will recognize the surface affect of Fish Tank. The roving camera following a young person briskly navigating the streets of a depressed urban landscape; this landscape itself is blasted and dirty, untended and littered, strewn with garbage and graffiti. Through this world charges Mia, whose anger is both typical of the barbed and defensive teenage girl, but also individual to her as a coping mechanism in dire circumstances, mostly a household of continual hostility. The camera stays close to Mia as she charges determinedly through the streets, figuring out how to survive. When she is alone, she is still moving. Mia occasionally breaks into an abandoned apartment in the building where she practices dancing alone.

Fish Tank is the kind of movie where no one scene makes full sense until after you’ve seen all the others. For example, in an early scene, Mia clashes with a group of girls rehearsing a dance on a tarmac, and she ends up head-butting one of them. Only later do we learn the reason for her ire. Mia feels competitive because she is an aspiring but bashful or unconfident dancer herself. Fish Tank is also somewhat different from the other melancholy modern kitchen sink movies: Its narrative is cohesive; the tone is consistent (other kitchen sinkers sometimes include distracting crude humor). And there is a visual flair to the film that raises it above the typical griminess of most of its kind. And it has the rare virtue, especially in contrast to these days when Hollywood tent pole movies are more predictable than ever, that you never quite know what is going to happen next. Fish Tank is a penetrating Petri dish of ordinary life made explicable and poignant.

D.K. Holm is The Voice’s cinema critic and author of several recent and forthcoming books, including Film Soleil.