Spud

John Milton (Troye Sivan), a.k.a. Spud, 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 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 from 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, Rambo, Rain Man and Mad Dog, and he has his hands full trying to adapt to his new home. He also has to outwit Pike and Devries, two of the older boys who do all they can to get Spud, the scholar and outsider, expelled. 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, 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. Based on the novel by John Van De Ruit.