Portrayal of the late Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar.
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Clio Barnard directs this avant-garde docu-drama chronicling the life and legacy of the late Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. Dunbar, who wrote the plays 'The Arbor' and 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too', was hailed as 'a genius straight from the slums' for her unflinching autobiographical portrayals of her upbringing on the notorious Buttershaw Estate in Bradford. When she died at age of 29 in 1990, her daughter Lorraine, now 29 herself, was just ten years old. This film catches up with Lorraine in the present day and finds her alienated from her mother's family and in prison undergoing rehab. As she is re-introduced to her mother's plays and letters, Lorraine begins to understand the personal difficulties her mother went through and reflects on their impact on her own life. The film mixes fact with fiction by using actors to lip-synch words actually spoken by members of Dunbar's family and residents from the Buttershaw Estate.
Andrea Dunbar was a British playwright whose work reflected the gritty realities of life in working-class Bradford, West Yorkshire. Dunbar knew of what she wrote -- she grew up in a Bradford council estate, had children by three different men, was a victim of domestic violence, and struggled with alcoholism before she died in 1990 when she was only 29. Andrea's daughter Lorraine Dunbar inherited her gift with language, but also her weaknesses; she also dealt with unhappy relationships with men, worked as a prostitute, became addicted to hard drugs, and served time for manslaughter when her two-year-old son died after drinking her methadone. Filmmaker Clio Barnard set out to tell the story of Andrea Dunbar's brief, troubled life and the neighbourhood where she lived and wrote, and THE ARBOR is a unique mixture of documentary and narrative filmmaking. In addition to interviews with members of Andrea Dunbar's family and residents of Bradford's Buttershaw estates, where Dunbar's plays took place (which are lip-synched by actors to create a distancing effect), the film includes passages from Dunbar's first play, also called THE ARBOR, played out against the real-life locations where the story is set.
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