Our take
Artist and filmmaker Clio Barnard put herself on the map of new British talents with her 2010 debut The Arbor, a daring, genre-bending biopic about Bradford-born playwright Andrea Dunbar and her tragic personal and impressive artistic life. Coming from a poor working class family with seven siblings, Dunbar wrote her first play age 15. She died in 1990, aged 29, and left a legacy of three plays in total. Knowing how under-appreciated her work has been, Barnard decided to revive the life that imbued Dunbar’s creations. Rather than staging a conventional documentary, the director features interviews with family and friends, performed and lip-synced by actors in front of the camera. She also adds re-enactments of the plays that feature the estate where Dunbar grew up, as well as archival footage of her TV appearances. The Arbor is an experimental documentary, but that doesn’t prevent it from being touching, humane, and a special tribute to art flourishing in adverse circumstances.
What it won
BAFTA
1 nom
LAFCA
1 nom
The story
The lives of the late Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar and Lorraine, one of her daughters, and the community of Bradford, in the 30 years since the 18-year-old Andrea penned a play about growing up in the community titled "The Arbor".
Elsewhere
"Barnard's boldest move is to unveil the irresponsible chaos of the playwright's private life, and to make us wonder if the art was worth the suffering, after all."
— Anthony Lane
The life and works of British playwright Andrea Dunbar who died age 29, as told through a blend of documentary and performance.
Blending documentary and fiction is not a radical move per se, but combining performance art, fiction, and docu tropes is another thing. Clio Barnard went to art school and it shows: the ease with which she strings together high-brow concepts, transforming them into palatable, affective scenes, is unmatched. Take, for example, the idea to have actors lip-syncing actual interviews sourced from the archive. Such a conceit could easily turn gimmicky, but in the case of The Arbor, the chasm between performance, recital, and lived reality (retold), can fit a whole world. Inspired by the so-called verbatim theatre (word for word), this device shapes the whole film as a median space and a tribute to Andrea Dunbar, in ways she herself would have appreciated.
Modest, tragic, innovative: the three qualities you can barely find in British cinema anymore.
The details
Streaming arrival
Who picked it
Savina Petkova, PhD, is a Bulgarian film critic and curator based in London whose work has appeared in Sight and Sound, Variety, Little White Lies, Cineuropa, and MUBI Notebook. She is the Programming Lead for Cambridge Film Festival and a senior editor at Talking Shorts, with a focus on contemporary European cinema.
"What emerges is a curious mix of avant-garde technique and social-realist case study, equally indebted to Barnard's art-world-video background and Dunbar's own close-to-the-bone writing."
— Nicolas Rapold