Clio Barnard wins best newcomer at LFF

I am thrilled that Clio Barnard has won the award for best newcomer at the London Film Festival. She’s always been an interesting artist but her new film, The Arbor, is extraordinary; a radical, strange and moving work that tangles fact and fiction in order to explore the life, death and legacy of Andrea Dunbar, the young playwright who grew up on the rough Buttershaw estate in Bradford, Yorkshire. Dunbar wrote her semi-autobiographical first play (after which Barnard’s film is obviously titled) The Arbor – about a pregnant schoolgirl who lives on a racist estate and her Pakistani boyfriend – at the age of 15; it was first performed at London’s Royal Court in 1980, when she was still a teenager. Commissioned by the Royal Court to write another play, she penned Rita, Sue and Bob Too – a harrowing and often bleakly funny tale of a married man’s affair with two teenage girls; it was later made into a film that Dunbar disowned when new writers were brought in to give the script a positive ending. Depressed and alcoholic, in 1990 Dunbar died of a brain haemorrhage in a pub at the age of 29.
Barnard, who is a contemporary of Dunbar’s and who grew up on the outskirts of Bradford, was curious about the playwright’s life and the fate of her three children. The Arbor, which was commissioned by Artangel, is comprised of interviews not only with Dunbar’s family but with local residents: documentary footage mingles with scenes of her plays performed on the streets of the Buttershaw estate and professional actors lip-synching to the voices of friends and relatives who preferred not to be filmed. The effect is mesmerizing and disconcerting: despite her sensitivity towards the nuances of Dunbar’s life, and her powerful strengths as a story-teller, Barnard never lets you forget that her so-called documentary is as vulnerable to the vagaries of representing reality as a feature film. As she states: ‘I think documentaries are shaped like fictions and that there’s a very close relationship between documentaries and fiction and a lot of crossover. But we have this peculiar expectation with documentaries that they not be mediated … I think it’s more honest and straightforward to acknowledge that it’s constructed.’
The Arbor is now on release in selected cinemas. Go see it. And if you’d like to read the ‘Life in Film’ Barnard wrote for frieze, it’s here.