The Arbor
Filmmaker: Clio Barnard
Manjinder Virk, Neil Dudgeon, Monica Dolan
UK / 2010 / 94 minutes / English
Opening Weekend Date: 22 October 2010
Cinemas screening the film: Odeon Panton Street, Curzon Renoir, Ritzy Picture House & Key Cities
Stop press: Clio Barnard wins London Film Festival's Best Newcomer and Sutherland Awards for The Arbor.
Artist/filmmaker Barnard's extraordinary and imaginative portrait of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar weaves together documentary footage and interviews gathered over two years' research - strikingly reproduced by lip-synching actors - alongside a staging of Dunbar's play The Arbor outside her childhood residence, Bradford's Buttershaw Estate. Compassionate, brutal and deeply moving.
Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar was the author of three raw and witty plays, including The Arbor, and the film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, drawing heavily on her experiences growing up on the notoriously deprived Buttershaw estate. She was also someone who led a short and often troubled life, dying of a brain haemorrhage, aged 29, while drinking in her local pub. Artist-filmmaker Clio Barnard, with a commission from Artangel, spent two years interviewing Dunbar's family and friends, and these personal accounts form the backbone to this extraordinary film.
"Convincing and often staggeringly moving"
Time Out
"A remarkable film: conceptually acute, brilliantly realised, impossibly sad"
Daily Telegraph