The Arbor

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.

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.

By using actors who are lip-syncing interviews of actual people in Andrea Dunbar's life, this film pushes the documentary genre completely into the dramatic cinema field, with very interesting and moving results. Mix in stagings of her plays in the actual British housing projects where they were set, and vintage TV footage, you get a fascinating very creative mix.

It's also a very enlightening portrait of a woman who used art and the written word to pull herself out of the slums, but failed to change as a human being, basically living the life of the housing project trash that she wrote about, abusing her children as a result.

A fresh and very cinematic take on the documentary form. Check it out.

I came to this film thinking that it was a documentary about the young writer Andrea Dunbar, who wrote the play (then film) Rita, Sue and Bob Too as well as a couple of other works before dying very young. I wasn't sure why I should be interested in her or her work but I had heard good things about the film (and had also seen Clio Barnard's previous short films) so I decided to give it a go. What I found was a film that wasn't really about Andrea Dunbar so much as it was the life of her mixed race daughter Lorraine.

In telling this story the film not only tells us about Lorraine's life but also gives us the context by filling in who her mother was (mainly from old BBC documentaries that Lorraine watches) but also shows us what the estate is like by enacting parts of her play on the estate. It is a very creative approach and the blend of documentary and drama compliments each other since the original play was so real as to be a documentary and the real story of their lives is so engaging that it could have been a scripted drama. The film captures this really well and the various sections and threads just fit perfectly together – you are being told about different people in different ways but it never feels like anything other than one story.

I didn't know any of this story so for me it really did impact to hear about the damaged lives coming out of this world (a world shown to us through the play). Assuming others do not know either, I will say no more on the content but it is brutal and saddening but rewarding thanks to how it is told. Much like her short films, Barnard approaches this as a documentary of real people telling stories but where in her shorts I think she hurt the films by having overly distracting images and cutaways as part of her design, here her visual content does nothing but add to the telling. Her "visuals" are actors lip-synching with the recorded word of the real people. The word "lip-synching" has negative connotations – it means pretending, faking it etc in regards music but here it is a great device. The actors not only hit their marks in regards the words, but they do so in a way where they make the words come alive. Virk is tragically brilliant and makes her character sympathetic without making excuses for her; she holds the attention and brings so much out in face and body. Gavin is great as the "girl" in the play – it is her role to help us understand the Dunbar not shown in the BBC interviews, and she does this really well. Down through the cast everyone delivers and they succeed despite the limits of not only the words they have to say, but the nuances and the timing of those words – the majority of the cast have little freedom to move but yet they deliver great performances.

Barnard was showered with praise for this film and rightly so. It is engaging in its telling of this brutal and fascinating family story and it is done with creativity. The blend of documentary and drama is really well done whether it is in the grand scheme of things or even in the smaller detail such as setting the play sections on the estate with people watching in the background. It is not a cheerful film but yet it is a very good one and it is very much worth seeing. I've had issues with some of Barnard's work before, but with this I have almost no reservations about it.

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.