By: Victoria Mapplebeck, Royal Holloway University of London
Ten years ago I was at a preview screening at the British Film Institute (BFI) of short films shot and set in London. My smartphone-filmed short, 160 Characters, was part of the programme and told the story of me raising my son Jim alone.
I was excited to have my film included, but by the end of the night I was a little less euphoric. I was one of only a handful of women directors screening work that night and almost every film in the programme was set on a council estate, featuring one-dimensional characters who were either mad, bad or sad.
At the post-screening drinks, I met some of the male directors who’d written and directed those films. Several of them had put between £20,000 and £40,000 of their own money into their productions, hoping their short would be the calling card to their first feature. Having a “day job” was not a concept they seemed to have come across.
Flash forward a decade and I’m at a Reclaim The Frame preview screening of Daisy May Hudson’s feature drama Lollipop, watching her receive a standing ovation from an audience who – like me – were bowled over by the authenticity and power of her storytelling .
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
Lollipop is a BBC Films-funded feature drama which tells the story of Molly (Posy Sterling), recently out of a prison after serving a four-month sentence. She comes out to find she has lost her council housing and custody of her kids. Molly finds herself in the mother of all catch-22s: she can’t get housing because she doesn’t have her kids living with her, but she can’t get them back without a roof over her head.
On the surface, this film could read like another council estate melodrama. But Lollipop is the polar opposite of middle class fantasies of working class life. When Hudson was writing it she drew on her own experience of homelessness, explored in her debut feature documentary, Half Way (2015).
In Half Way, Hudson, her mum and her kid sister find themselves stuck in “half way” hostels in an endless battle with council bureaucrats who meet their escalating housing crisis with a continual chorus of “computer says no”.
There’s a great scene in which Hudson’s sister complains that the film is too heavy and that she’s sick of talking about their “trauma”. She jokes: “I was thinking we need to liven this documentary up, it’s really dull and miserable and boring, we just talk about doom and gloom stuff.” She goes on to mimic Hudson’s line of questions about how they’re all “feeling”.
Hudson’s decision to keep that scene in gave us a much needed reminder of how many documentary directors fall into the trap of “poverty porn” in which the money shot is the tear rolling down your protagonist’s cheek.
Watching Lollipop with an audience of mainly women, there were a lot of tears but also lots of laughter. Hudson continues to see the importance of humour in her stories as a way of enriching and empowering her characters. She explains in the film’s production notes: “Although Lollipop is grounded in real-life, I never want to see women as victims on screen, because we’re so full of life, there’s so much about us.”
In Hudson’s entirely female cast, Molly and her best mate Amina (Idil Ahmed) are fierce single mums who transform the challenges they face into laugh-out-loud moments of comedy. The film is about the power of their friendship, their love for their kids and their sense of humour.
When it came to casting, Hudson wanted to work with women actors – professionals and first timers – who could relate to what the characters were going through. In the film’s production notes, Hudson explains:
I come from a lived experience background, and it was really important to me that I worked with women with lived experience … women who felt full and rounded, not perfect. Every woman you see in the film is someone trying to do their best. We’re humans. We’re messy, and our beauty is in our messiness.
Hudson’s work is part of a new wave of film and TV drama and comedy written and directed by women who are empowered rather than disempowered by their messiness.
Cash Carraway’s Rain Dogs (2023), Sophie Willan’s Alma’s Not Normal (2020), Michelle de Swarte’s Spent (2024) and Charlotte Regan’s debut feature drama, Scrapper (2023) are all part of an emerging genre of stories in which we finally see working class characters who are well written and relatable. Every one of these directors has mined the highs and lows of their own lives to create these funny, flawed, complex and ultimately believable characters.
Rain Dogs*, for instance,* follows the roller-coaster journey of Costello (Daisy May Cooper), a single mum battling to find a permanent home for her and her nine-year-old daughter. Carraway has said of her series:
We don’t see interesting single mothers in TV. We don’t really see that many interesting people living in poverty. If we do, it’s always politicised. I wanted to make it entertaining.
Hudson echoes these sentiments. Speaking to me over the phone, she explains:
Lollipop isn’t issue-led. I don’t want to shout from the rooftops and talk about everything that’s wrong with the world. Yes, the context is these things that I care strongly about. But ultimately, I want audiences to come away, feeling: Wow, isn’t love a magical thing?“
Hudson’s mantra in both life and film is to: “Turn your pain into power and into medicine.” Her women characters have an alchemy and agency we rarely see in the black and white council estate films that became such a staple of UK independent films in the 80s and 90s. Hudson’s women aren’t victims or martyrs, the magic of Lollipop is that she has created fascinating real characters – and captured them in glorious technicolour.
Victoria Mapplebeck, Professor in Digital Arts, Royal Holloway University of London
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
