The Arbor

Streaming video - 2010

Clio Barnard’s multi-award winning double portrait of failed motherhood moves between the tragic lives of playwright Andrea Dunbar and her eldest daughter Lorraine. Coming from the squalor of post-industrial Bradford, Andrea’s plays were performed during the 1980s at the Royal Court Theatre in London. She died aged twenty-nine – alcoholic and having had three children by different fathers. Her daughter Lorraine’s life would follow a remarkably similar downward spiral. Barnard employs the cinematic device of actors lip-syncing the voices of real people, as well as performance and found footage, to create a fascinating layering across time – psychoanalytic and historical, poetic yet devastatingly real.