The Arbor

It tells the life story of UK playwright Andrea Dunbar, who s was discovered at a very young age in the British housing projects known as 'The Arbor' where she wrote about the alcoholism and family decay she watched around her.

The film uses two extraordinary devices, both of which I found off-putting at first, but had great impact by the end.

First, scenes from Dunbar's plays are staged in the open lawn areas of the real life Arbor, so we see a fight taking place in a living room at night acted out on the grass in broad daylight (with a couch and other living room props sitting there surreally, watched by – presumably – the neighborhood people still struggling under the same conditions. At first this just seemed distracting, but over time, it helped bring home that Dunbar's works represented real people, real lives, real pain.

The second, even odder and more audacious move, is to have all the interviews with the real participants acted out by professional actors lip-syncing to the recorded words of the real people. Again, the was distracting for the first while, but eventually it lead to the film feeling simultaneously dreamy and like a memory, and in some way more 'real' than if the actors simply used their own voices.

A very moving film that doesn't always work, but his heroic enough in it's bravery that it more than overcomes the occasional missed step.

Location shots, real people, and actors are deployed in a seamless amalgam in this recollection of of the talented but short-lived alcoholic working-class playwright Andrea Dunbar, from Bradford, West Yorkshire. Filmmaker Clio Barnard first spent two years recording interviews with Dunbar's family and friends,. Then she staged actors lip-synching the interviews as monologues, sometimes in a group scene -- a technique known as "verbatim theater" that arguably works more seamlessly because of Bernard's use of filmed settings. Barnard also staged parts of one of Dunbar's plays out near "The Arbor," ther part of the Yorkshire housing estate where Dunbar grew up and of which her plays speak. This is also the name of Dunbar's first play. Another one, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, was made into a reportedly excellent film. After a while, thanks in part to the excellent editing of Ole Birekland, you don't know who's the real person and who's an actor (because vintage footage of the people is there too). This creates a kind of Brechtian "Alienation Effect" that paradoxically makes it all more real and memorable. In the course of compensating mentally for shifts of format and perspective, you wind up projecting yourself into Andrea Dunbar's world.

It's a tough trip. Dunbar grew up in the Butterfield Estates during the decline of the textile mills, writing her first play at fifteen. She was already experiencing the prevailing racism, alcoholism and domestic violence. Eventually, by the time she died at 29 of a cerebral hemorrhage, she'd had become a heavy drinker and had three children by three different fathers. The eldest, Lorraine, played here by the sad- eyed, insinuating Manjinder Virk, was a dark-skinned, pretty girl whose dad was of Pakistani origin. She was to write no plays, but otherwise would duplicate her mother's unfortunate model of children by different fathers, drug addiction instead of alcoholism, and imprisonment for the causing the death of her child by extreme negligence.

Editing is a key factor here, but all elements are so smoothly handled you become unaware of the many layers and modes at work. Over-titles identifying the main speakers when the first appear also help to create the desired confusion. In news footage where the family is interviewed after Andrea's first London success, her real dad bears a quite striking resemblance to the father in the staged play. At the play, many people, presumably current residents of the estates, stand around to watch -- another way boundaries are broken. Ronnie Schieb calls this "a must-see entry in the ongoing evolution of cinematic formalism," but this "formally inventive" and "socially revelatory" exploration, neither formal nor abstract in the playing out, never seems anything but real, down to the sometimes almost impenetrable accents of the recorded speakers whose voices flow through the scenes. Very good foreground and ambient sound contributes to the seamless effect, of course. Credit here to Dolby Digital sound designer Tim Barker and re-recording mixer Richard Davey.

There is a Rashomon-like aspect as one gradually watches Andreas's story unfold from multiple sources, including the various fathers of her children, and the most personal moments come with Lorraine's unfolding confessions. As Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote about the film last spring, Barnard's "technique produces a hyperreal intensification of the pain in Dunbar's work and in her life," and this pain becomes most vivid as we realize that in Lorraine's life Andrea's tragedy "was replicated, almost genetically." Bradshaw makes another good point: Dunbar's story, and her success as a teenage playwright in Max Stafford-Clark's Royal Court, challenges a lot of what we assume about gritty realist theatre or literature from the tough north," because the plays are usually produced "by men whose gender privileges are reinforced by university." They become stories of how they got out. But Dunbar never got out.

The Arbor, Barnard's debut feature, got a raft of nominations at BAFTA and the London Critics Circle, and two actual awards, one at Sheffield's documentary festival (Innovation Award) and the British Independent Film award for Best Achievement in Production. It's not a cheerful watch, but it's a very compelling one and a remarkable accomplishment by Clio Bernard -- as well as by the principal actors, Manjinder Virk, Christine Bottomley, Neil Dudgeon, Monica Dolan, Danny Webb, Kathryn Pogson, Natalie Gavin, Jonathan Haynes, Jimi Mistry, George Costigan. Try as you may, you will not spot their lips out of sync.

The 94-minute The Arbor won Barnard a best new documentary filmmaker prize at 2010's year's Tribeca Film Festival. It will get a theatrical U.S. release by Strand in April 2011. Seen and reviewed as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, April 2011.

Andrea Dunbar wrote two plays before she died tragically young at the age of 29 - 'The Arbor', of which we see snatches and scenes here, and 'Rita, Sue and Bob, Too', which was made into a well-regarded film.

This drama-documentary is rather different to the usual type because not only does it use real interview and actual footage of Dunbar from her TV appearances, but uses real interviews with her family and friends which are then lip-synched (very well) by professional actors. This sounds like a gimmick, but we very quickly forget we are not watching the real people talking about their lives - when we do get jolted out of this by associations with other work (George Costigan 'plays' Dunbar's partner but also of course was 'Bob' in the aforementioned film), it still somehow works.

Dunbar's story was a tragic one, one of wasted talent and a toxic life, to some degree, although her children - mixed-race Lorraine and Lisa - have very different stories about their childhood and the impact their mother had on them. Lorraine's story is just as tragic in its way, and we follow that following the description of Andrea Dunbar's death.

A new and dynamic way of presenting real people's issues and problems, 'The Arbor' is very possibly something Dunbar could have created herself had she lived. As it is, it stands as an interesting memorial to her talent.

'The Arbor' of the title refers to a street called the 'Brafferton Arbor' on the Buttershaw estate in the city of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. The people who lived there back in the 1980's were not rich, but one of them, Andrea Dunbar, became well known as a playwright. A lot of her work was biographical and this film tells us about her and about her oldest daughter, Lorraine, both through her work and by the use of actors lip-syncing to the voices of her friends and family.

It is no secret that Andrea Dunbar died quite young, but she did have two plays open in London and one of them was made into a film in 1987. This was, of course, Rita, Sue and Bob Too!. If you haven't seen it and you're interested in this documentary, it's one I can recommend. But back to 'The Arbor', it is a very touching film at times, it can be quite dark too, but over all the people speaking are very realistic about life, the universe and everything. I found it quite compelling viewing, partly because I work in the city of Bradford and it's quite sad to think these things are still going on today (particularly around the area where I work). I guess if you're up for a gritty realistic tale of northern folk then I can highly recommend it.

Just as a footnote, there's a piece of archive footage of Andrea getting on a train near the end of the film. She is getting the train at my local railway station… A small claim to fame for the town I frequent.

My Score: 7.7/10

Andrea Dunbar was something of a child prodigy growing up on the underprivileged Buttershaw Estate in Bradford. Dunbar wrote her first play The Arbor, (named after the street on which she lived Brafferton Arbor,) at the tender age of 15. The play, which debuted at the Royal Court Theatre in 1980, depicts the turbulent life of pregnant teenager with a father who is an abusive alcoholic. In 1982 Dunbar wrote the follow up Rita, Sue and Bob Too! which was later turned into a film by the director Alan Clarke. By 1990, at just 29 years old, Andrea Dunbar was dead, killed by an apparent brain haemorrhage the talented author left behind three young children. Artist and filmmaker Clio Barnard's new biopic, also entitled The Arbor, attempts not only to tell Andrea's story but also that of her eldest daughter Lorraine, who was imprisoned in 2007 for the manslaughter of her son Harris.

A drama/documentary in the truest, and perhaps newest, sense of the phrase The Arbor utilizes archive footage culled from television documentaries such as Arena and Look North, an original technique where actors lip-sync to the voices of the real life participants in Dunbar's troubled life and impromptu performances of the author's work taking place on the Buttershaw Estate. Theoretically speaking this multi-layered approach sounds as if it might be somewhat confusing and imprecise in practice however it is a revelation being both innovative and inspiring. With a shifting timeframe and multiple story telling techniques the resulting film not only offers a detailed insight into the lives of Andrea Dunbar and her daughter Lorraine but also into that whole section society recently dubbed 'Broken Britain.' The film begins in the present day with Dunbar's two daughters Lorraine (Manjinder Virk) and Lisa (Christine Bottomley) telling of their childhood and formative years. These scenes, in which the actors address the camera and lip-sync their speech to actual voices of the people they are portraying are carried off with remarkable accuracy and have a haunting quality to them. It is as if the actors are channelling those involved from another time and place with a story yet to be told. The voices of the interviewees are filled with regret rather than anger at wasted opportunities and what might have been, there is also a great deal of understanding at the circumstances and pressures each of them have faced in the past.

Life has been particularly difficult for eldest daughter Lorraine growing up as a mixed-race child a predominately white estate she was racially abused on a daily basis for having a Pakistani father. Just 10 years old when her mother passed away Lorraine would later turn to prostitution to feed her drug habit. As her life quickly spiralled out of control she fell pregnant by one of her clients and struggled to bring up her child.

The documentary footage of Andrea Dunbar shows the author at home on the Buttershaw Estate where she continued to live until her untimely death. The semi-biographical nature of Dunbar's writing is obvious in the remarkable similarity between her own family and the characters of her creation. Given the present day world of celebrity these scenes, (in which fame appears to have been foisted upon an unassuming talent,) are reminiscent of the countless reality TV stars that are ill-prepared for the spotlight.

The scenes in which parts of Dunbar's plays that are acted out on the estate are excellent giving off the urgency and realism of the writing. As the current residents loiter in the background Natalie Gavin who plays the young Andrea enthusiastically explains her work to the camera before launching into another energetic performance.

At the conclusion of The Arbor Lorraine, who has now released from prison after serving 3 years for the manslaughter of her son, tells us that her life reflects many inhabitants of the Buttershaw Estate. Where once the social problems were those of unemployment, poverty and alcoholism the estate has deteriorated further becoming a ghetto of drug dealing, crime and disorder. Lorraine tells us that if her mother were to write Rita Sue and Bob Too! in the present day, "Rita and Sue would be smackheads." The lasting influence of Andrea Dunbar's writing can be found in modern British film and television not least in the television drama Shameless which depicts life on the Chatsworth Estate with a similar combination of bawdy humour and satirical knowingness. The Arbor's unusual but innovative approach to drama/documentary uncovers, like Dunbar's plays, the hardship and problems which lie at the heart of working-class Britain, (albeit in a completely different manner.) Exploring the life of a significant contributor to British working-class fiction The Arbor like Andrea Dunbar herself is too authentic and insightful to ignore.