The Thousands

Playwright Andrea Dunbar grew up on a street called Brafferton Arbor on the notorious Buttershaw housing estate in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where her autobiographical plays are set. Discovered in 1977 at age 15 and hailed as the authentic voice of an underclass, Dunbar died of a brain haemorrhage at only 29. But Clio Barnard’s extraordinary documentary refuses the platitude of a brilliant young talent tragically lost.

Disconcertingly, Barnard films actors lip-syncing to interviews with Dunbar’s actual family and friends, interspersed with dramatised flashbacks and scenes from Dunbar’s debut play The Arbor performed in the actual Arbor, with today’s residents as the audience. Barnard’s elegantly composed shots have the heft of epic tragedy, even as her interviewees speak in halting, kitchen-sink sentences. The Arbor is both self-consciously fake and grungily hyperreal, creating the sense that this place, ironically devoid of trees, has a malign life of its own.

Dunbar emerges as a pretty troubled person, but The Arbor is really the story of her resentful eldest daughter Lorraine (Manjinder Virk), who’s more troubled still, alienating most of her family. As Lorraine’s sister Lisa (Christine Bottomley) says: “I’ll never blame my mother for anything I’ve done in my life.”

Watch the trailer here.