Interview with Clio Barnard: The Arbor

Although Clio Barnard’s new film The Arbor chronicles the rough-and-tumble life of celebrated British playwright Andrea Dunbar (Rita, Sue and Bob Too), an alcoholic who died from a brain hemorrhage at age 29, it is anything but conventional in its aims and methodology. Shot in and around Brafferton Arbor, a street on the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, Yorkshire, where Dunbar lived and worked while raising her three children, The Arborreconstructs the late writer’s gritty milieu through the testimony of her eldest daughter Lorraine and other family members, whose words are lip-synched by professional actors in evocative set-designed environments. Barnard, an installation artist and filmmaker who used the technique previously for a 1998 short film called Random Acts of Intimacy, also cuts in scenes from Dunbar’s heavily autobiographical play The Arbor, performed outdoors by a mix of actors and estate residents, as well as bits of archive.

Click here to read the rest of my interview at Filmmaker.