Dustbin Baby

Wow, what an absolutely lovely movie! Enjoyed every minute of it and as a bloke, had me reaching for paper tissues at the end. A simple story of a young girl who was dumped at birth in the dustbin behind a pizza parlour and after various care homes is eventually brought up for a period by the Teacher from the school, Juliette Stevenson as Marion. this is low budget and typically British and without doubt unmissable with anyone with a child. Juliett as Marion is outstanding and Dakota blue Richards as April is one to watch for the future. I love the moment half way through of the rubbish being used for a artistic 'horse' and will definitely be giving my own teenage children ideas from this one in a positive way. the mobile phone birthday present thing was a good story line and don't miss the shots of hatfield house, the stately home bossed by Marions friend and former home of Elizabeth I. I think the main town featured is Watford but I stand to bed corrected. Two great British movies in the last few days, harry Brown and this one, but totally different kinds of films. keep it away from the American market, this is a quality film to be enjoyed at the cinema or DVD

"Dustbin Baby" is a BBC film directed by Juliet May, based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Jacqueline Wilson. The film follows the story of young teenager April (Dakota Blue Richards) on a journey of self-discovery on her 14th birthday, as she tries to piece together the events of the day of her birth. Already aware that she was found newborn (George Bustin) in a garbage can by Frankie (Chris Ryman), a 14-year-old pizzeria employee, April skips school on her birthday to see if she finally gets some answers to the question. Mystery. Of his birth and past before his first adoption. Currently living with Marion Bean (Juliet Stevenson), April's former teacher who has a crush on her, April hopes to get a cell phone for her birthday, only to receive beautiful moonstone earrings. In a teenage adventure, April leaves for school without a phone, where she lies to her friends Cathy (Saffron Coomber) and Hannah (Poppy Lee Friar) by claiming she has a phone but is charging it at home. She furthers her lies by telling her friends that she has a dentist appointment on her birthday, giving her the opportunity to escape people she knows in her current life to look into her past timeline's roots.

April finds herself visiting Pat Williams (Di Botcher), the woman who took care of her and other orphaned children when she was a baby before her first adoption. They touch each other as Pat reminisces about his short time with April and what a delight she was as a young girl. She gives April a newspaper clipping from the day after her birth, finally being able to put a face to her savior's name. She then goes to visit her former adoptive mother, Janet Johnson (Carol Starks), or more specifically her grave. Then we recall the first adoption of a young April (Lucy Hutchinson), where she was absolutely devoted to Janet. Unfortunately for April, Janet was married to Daniel Johnson (Ian Kelsey), who was an abusive spouse who ended up leaving Janet and April, letting Janet believe it was all her fault and taking her own life.

April is then shuttled between foster homes until she finds herself in the Sunny Home Children's Home as 8-year-old April (Alex Hewett). At the orphanage, April befriends teenage Gina (Leah Harvey), who often asks April to help with burglaries where she can't fit in windows and small spaces to hide. However, this isn't the only way April misbehaves when meeting Pearl (Sylvia Hodgson), only to discover that Pearl is a bully when the adults aren't around. After several incidents of Pearl bullying April without her saying anything to an adult, she pushes Pearl down the stairs, much to the dismay of head caretaker Mo (Nicola Duffett). April is then transferred to Fairdale Residential School, where she is tutored by Marion, eventually learning the chain of events that led Marion to take her in.

Meanwhile, in the present day, we see two sides of the journey: April wandering around London, looking for clues as to where her biological mother might be; and Marion looking for April when she discovers her adopted daughter has been absent from school. With the help of her colleague at the mansion she works at, Elliot (David Haig), she is seen running through the local area and going further afield in search of April, while in a panic she fled. Away permanently upon learning how attached April was previously to Janet. It's a race against the clock to ensure the safety of April, who is about to reveal the truth behind her early stages of life. This film is a walkthrough of the main character's life with attempts to pass it off as a dramatic adventure.

The screenplay for this British TV adaptation was written by Helen Blakeman, who had previously worked on "Pleasureland". "Dustbin Baby" was commissioned by CBBC and BBC One, and was produced by Kindle Entertainment, a production company specializing in children's television. According to The Guardian, the film was heralded as "a key part of BBC1's family Christmas programming". At the time, the screenwriter said that when she read the novel, she "knew it was something she had to write". Director Juliet May, at the time of filming, had 14-year-old twins, thought "the fact that the protagonist April is 14 would be very interesting", as she felt she could understand the head of a teenager of that age. The production deals with controversial and sensitive topics such as bullying, juvenile crimes, domestic violence, unwanted pregnancies and adolescent anguish.

The film also addressed the topic of Asperger's syndrome. The BBC purposely sought an actor with Asperger's syndrome to play the role of Poppy. Lizzy Clark auditioned for the role after her mother saw an ad on an autism website. Clark was selected to play Poppy, and the role in Dustbin Baby was his first professional acting experience. Clark was credited with being the first actress with Asperger's syndrome to portray a fictional character with the condition. Clark, who has since campaigned with her mother against characters with conditions like Asperger's being played by actors without the condition.

Because of the weak script, the characterization of all the characters fell flat and really didn't make complete sense based on what we learned in earlier stages of April's story. Somehow April turns from a sweet young woman with a lot of potential into someone who thinks she's not good enough to associate with someone who doesn't really benefit her pursuit. It is understood that April has become a teenager, but that doesn't excuse the direction they chose to take the narrative, where everything revolved around her, without trying to figure out how people from her past actually behave when she comes across them. One of the script's biggest flaws is that it doesn't deepen the relationships with people who were part of its past, there isn't even a relevant story, an interesting revelation or anything... And it all takes place during an entire day. At least, we get to see in April how closed she is to herself, to know a little more about all the traumatic and difficult experiences she had to go through in childhood (forced to help with robberies at the orphanage; witnessing the suicide of her first adoptive mother, suffering with bullying from other children at the orphanage, etc.). We can understand why April is suspicious of everyone around her and why it is so difficult to trust and open up to the people around her (the difficulty portrayed in the film in hugging, which culminates in an emotional final scene is the main indication of this difficulty connecting).

Speaking of direction, it's hard to say if the characters lacked chemistry because of the direction or because the actors didn't match. Literally everyone felt uncomfortable in their roles. It all felt pretty awkward most of the time, with the development of April and Frankie's relationship being the only one that has any real spark. Some important details from the book also ended up being left out, for example this movie leaves out an important detail about why she is named April (because she was found on April Fools by Frankie), the little details like that help you really immerse yourself in the story and connect with April on her journey. Instead, we have an amalgamation of her backstory and the present day that doesn't define any niche information about the character.

The impression is that we have a very rushed story, which has a low-budget production treatment, almost a documentary, and not a work of fiction, and which fails to move throughout the entire film, failing to generate connection between the characters and the viewer. For the most part, this movie is backstory and a lot of walking where it tries to disguise itself as some form of artistic genius. With this walk, there really isn't much dialogue to go along with it, making the viewer feel like they're watching someone taking a mildly panicked walk through the streets of adjacent London boroughs, including central London at some point due to the end of April at Paddington Station. This whole walk doesn't really tell a story, but tries to set new scenes without adding too much to the overall plot.

This is a truly remarkable film, which everyone concerned about troubled young people should see. It is brilliantly written and directed, and the lead performances are stunning. The film's director, producer, two executive producers, novelist (Jacqueline Wilson), script writer (Helen Blakeman), and two lead performers are all female. The production company might therefore more appropriately have been called Sisterhood Productions. Not a single male had anything to do with the production of this film. This could explain the delicate sensitivity of the treatment of this harrowing story, which involves a woman and a girl. The main character is a girl named April Johnson. She is played successively by tiny tot Lucy Hutchinson (aged 5, so surely not the Lucy Hutchinson who wrote the famous memoirs in the 17th century?), Alex Hewett, and Dakota Blue Richards (aged 14, and presumably not a Sioux Indian), though the latter features in the film continuously, and the others only in flashbacks. All of them are marvellous actresses and do a superb job. Richards is miraculous, frankly. She is so convincing that it is hard not to believe she really is that disturbed and tormented girl. The acting sensation of the film is however Juliet Stevenson. She is incredibly and unnervingly convincing as a well-meaning but hopeless spinster teacher who gets everything wrong and is hopelessly out of touch with everyday reality. Considering how sophisticated and intelligent the real Juliet Stevenson is, for her to become this creature is truly amazing. She gets the body language right, is clumsy and hopeless and pathetic as she struggles to do the right thing. The film centres round the relationship between Stevenson and Richards, and they work together so well one would think they had been doing this for years. There are numerous excellent cameos and supporting roles, all done wonderfully well, such as the portrayal by Lizzy Clark of a dippy young girl named Poppy, and Leah Ferguson as the girl Gina who befriends April. The 'care system' in Britain for orphaned or abandoned children is ruthlessly exposed in this film as a shambles, a living horror, a nightmare of unimaginable proportions, a sadistic, unfeeling, punishing ordeal which would crush almost anyone and at the very least leave all of its victims emotional wrecks for life. It is so terrible, so sad, so hopeless, so horrible, that it seems a miracle for the character April even to be remotely sane by the time she has reached 14, when the main story takes place. As if the 'care system', social workers, and the despicable succession of dysfunctional and half-mad foster parents were not bad enough, April has the distinction of having been dumped into a dustbin on the day she was born. Towards the end of the film, she makes her way back to the alley where this happened in order to see the scene of her abandonment and humiliation as a newborn baby. Stevenson, having been a teacher of April, develops maternal feelings for her and takes her in as a foster mother with a difference. For the first time, April has her own bedroom, considerable comfort, plenty of food, and security. She lives in fear of being thrown out or told to move on at a moment's notice, which is all she has known all her life, though Stevenson has no such ideas and keeps reassuring her that the arrangement is permanent and 'this will always be your home'. Having at last made a couple of friends at school, April falls victim (as all teenagers these days do) to the insidious demands of commodity fetishism, in the form of her obsessive need for her own cell phone as a status symbol. But Stevenson is opposed to consumerism and product fetishism, so buys her for her birthday instead of the coveted pink cell phone a beautiful pair of moonstone earrings. These are contemptuously rejected by April, in a spoilt fit, and when she gets to school and her two girlfriends challenge her by asking where is her new pink cell phone (which she over-optimistically had told them she would be getting), she says it is at home charging, and she runs away from school and goes roving around looking for places where she once lived, searching for some feeble semblances of 'roots' or 'origins', and dreaming of meeting her real mother. Like all such kids, she wants to know 'who she is' (don't we all?). Richards conveys all of this with such fierce pride, rage, softness, sensitivity, childlike helplessness, fury, and determination, that she is a sheer Heinz 57 varieties of emotion, all in one exploding can which is blazing out of control and no one seems able to put it out. It is a tour de force performance, like Stevenson's own. Will they, can they, ever love one another as an almost-mother and an almost-daughter? Will April find any roots? Is there a real mother? Is there indeed anything at all to learn or know about a dustbin baby? This is an emotional roller-coaster, done with full authenticity. If it had been a Hollywood film, it would have been ruined by saccharine sweetness, but instead it is done with true grit. None of the young girls simper, nor do they cuddle the camera. Even cute little Lucy Hutchinson who is adorable does not over-act. Nothing is overdone, everything is restrained. The director Juliet May, who seems to have spent her whole life working in television, really does deserve a career in feature films after this triumph. But apart from all the creative achievements, this film is an important human document, and should be as widely seen as possible. I fear, however, that as a BBC TV film which the BBC could not even be bothered to release on DVD themselves (they handed it over to ITV!) this film may never have the extended audience that it should have.

When I received a replying letter from Jackie herself, it mentioned there was going to be a drama of Dustbin Baby, so I read the book before watching this. I flew through the book, it was really riveting and with the drama I was equally impressed. Jacqueline Wilson says it was the best adaptation of her work.

When I first heard about a character, Elliot, who was not in the book, I was a bit disappointed, but David Haig portrays Elliot brilliantly. Some of the novel was missed out, which was disappointing, but overall the drama was excellent.

Dakota Blue Richards plays April well and so does the young actress playing Young April. If you haven't read the book, READ IT. It has some extra bits in it. Still, the drama is great, great, great.

It's brilliant that the DVD will be released on 12th January.

Absolutely brilliant portrayal.

I read the book when I was possibly too young to understand all of it. I'm not now 25 years old and decided to revisit this.

So full of emotion, fantastic use of music and the acting was spot on. Brilliant use of the paper girls motif.

I was slightly annoyed at the inclusion of the Elliot character because was not in the book. He was a great actor, but I feel added nothing to the storyline. April is the main character, not Marion.

I would've loved to have seen the girly dressing-up scene with Tanya talking about Mandy, and a meeting scene with Elaine the Pain. However I understand that this film couldn't put them in due to time constraints.