The Arbor

Synopsis

This strangely affecting film tells the story of two sad lives lived out on a run-down estate in Bradford, one tragic, the other touched with tragedy but not yet over. It concerns the working-class playwright Andrea Dunbar and her daughter Lorraine, the eldest of three children she had with different fathers. Andrea drew on her life for the plays The Arbor and Rita, Sue and Bob Too! (which Alan Clarke made into a successful film in 1986) and died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990, largely due to her unruly life and heavy drinking.

Director Biography

Born Santa Barbara, USA in 1965, is an artist/film-maker whose work deals with the relationship between documentary and fiction, in particular the subjectivity of recollection. She often constructs fictional images around verbatim audio and vice versa.