Project presentations
Premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, New York
See Now / Soon for forthcoming screenings of this film.
Screened in the UK from October 2010
DVD release March 2011
staggeringly moving ★★★★★— Time Out London
In the Artangel Collection
The Arbor, described by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, is ‘a new kind of 'verbatim cinema' ... a modernist, compassionate biopic’, has been presented at film festivals, cinemas and galleries nationally and internationally.
This single-screen feature film has also been used as the central reference point in workshops for MA students and adult support groups, opening up conversations related to the themes in the film—from the role of lip-synching to intergenerational trauma.
Register your interest
Fill out the form to find out more about how you can borrow and present this work, including tech specs, use cases, and more.
The Arbor premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2010 and was screened at the London Film Festival and across the UK from October 2010, winning:
- Best New Documentary Film-maker at the Tribeca Film Festival 2010
- Best British Newcomer & Most Original Debut at the London Film Festival 2010
- Best Debut Director at the British Independent Film Awards 2010
- Best Screenplay at the 2010 London Evening Standard Film Awards
- Best Cinema Documentary at The Griersons 2011
The Arbor is a BBFC certificate 15 film, duration 1 hour 34 minutes.
brilliantly realised, impossibly sad ★★★★— The Telegraph
Audio: Artangel Podcast 3, Memory
27 minutes, 20 seconds
Episode 3 of the Artangel Podcast, Memory
In a many-layered tour through the subject of memory, Clio Barnard joins Susan Philipsz and Mike Kelley as they reflect on how the theme relates to her Artangel project. Barnard and her fellow artists consider ideas of personal, geographical, musical, architectural memory.
Featuring:
- Poet Lavinia Greenlaw
- Scientist Steven Rose
- Historian Michael Sherringham
- Violinist Paul Robertson
- Author Rachel Lichtenstein
- Music from The Arbor soundtrack by Molly Nyman and Harry Escott
- An extract from Susan Philipsz's project Surround Me
- Compositions by Felix Carey, Andrew Pekler and Ruaridh Law
Producer: Peter Meanwell
Also available to listen to on SoundCloud.
Image: Production still: Scene from Andrea Dunbar’s play, ‘The Arbor’ performed on Brafferton Arbor. Characters include (from left to right); Young David (Robert Emms), Yousaf (Jimi Mistry), Girl (Natalie Gavin). Photograph: Nick Wall
a modernist, compassionate biopic ★★★★— the Guardian
Born to Write and Die
by Lyn Gardner
When, at 18, Andrea Dunbar wrote The Arbor, The Mail on Sunday called her the new Shelagh Delaney, "a genius straight from the slums with black teeth and a brilliant smile". Andrea objected vehemently about the black teeth. "The thing about Andrea", recalls a friend, "is she didn't bullshit in life and she didn't in her plays."
An excerpt from Taking Stock: The Theatre of Max Stafford-Clark
by Philip Roberts and Max Stafford-Clark
All theatres draw from a pool of professional writers. Any theatre takes pride in presenting new work by Harold Pinter or Caryl Churchill. But its focus on people who haven’t previously considered themselves professional playwrights is arguably the most important function of the Royal Court Theatre [where Stafford-Clark was Artistic Director from 1979 to 1993]. One way of becoming immediately involved in the grassroots was through the annual Young Writers’ Festival. This was a national competition open to any aspiring writer up to the age of eighteen. Plays by younger writers made particularly strenuous demands on the actors’ versatility. Talking cabbages featured in one play, and neurotic guinea pigs in another, while adolescence provoked a flood of gloomy dramas that invariably ended in suicide or unwanted pregnancies. Every year there were twelve-page bloody sagas on the death of Mary Queen of Scots, as well as vicious satires about eccentric schoolteachers....
Past Event: As it Goes
What we stopped here for, and what we talking about rubber johnnys for — Andrea Dunbar, Rita, Sue and Bob Too
For four nights only in October 2010, Andrea Dunbar’s inimitable, controversial and hilarious, brutally honest and deeply personal voice was remembered through a series of readings performed at the Young Vic.
To coincide with the release of filmmaker Clio Barnard’s award-winning film The Arbor, these events were produced to celebrate the unique power of one of the UK’s most distinctive and sorely missed playwrights. Each reading was accompanied by one of four new short plays inspired by Andrea’s work by teenagers from east London, followed by the screening of scenes from The Arbor.
On the final day of readings a panel discussion took place with Max Stafford Clark, Clio Barnard, Jo Carter and actors from The Arbor, with a reading of Robin Soans’ play, A State Affair (2000) which looks at life on a Bradford estate.
As it Goes was developed with the support of Janice and David Blackburn and Gilberto Pozzi. It was an Artangel Interaction commission in collaboration with Immediate Theatre and the Young Vic.
Clio Barnard
Clio Barnard was selected as part of the 2006 open call for proposals from Artangel and Jerwood which resulted in her film, The Arbor in 2010. She was later on the judging panel for the open call in both 2013 and 2014.
Barnard is an artist filmmaker whose work has shown in cinemas, international film festivals and galleries including Tate Modern, Tate Britain and MoMA, New York. Her work has been screened on Channel 4 and had several international broadcasts.
Clio Barnard’s work is concerned with the relationship between fictional film language and documentary. She has often dislocated sound and image by constructing fictional images around verbatim audio. In The Arbor actors lip-synch to the voices of real people, questioning documentary’s aspiration to collapse the distance between reality and representation. Her films include: Plotlands (Whitstable Biennale), Road Race(Film London), Random Acts of Intimacy (BFI/Channel 4) and Headcase (Arts Council England / Channel 4). Barnard is also one of the winners of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and, for The Arbor, winner of the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award at the Tribeca Film Festival 2010.
Images: (left) Clio Barnard, watches a scene from Andrea Dunbar’s play,‘The Arbor’ being performed on Brafferton Arbor, with a young resident; (above) behind camera on The Arbor. Both photographs: Nick Wall
The overall effect is devastating, as multi-layered and dissonant as a Schoenberg symphony, and a nightmarish impression of how the writer experienced both reality and performance. — Sebastian Doggart, The Telegraph
Emotionally engaging, stylistically radical, and utterly unforgettable. – Mark Kermode, BFI YouTube channel, 16 Sep 2016
Barnard has created a modernist, compassionate biopic: a tribute to her memory and her embattled community. — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 22 October 2010
The overall effect is devastating, as multi-layered and dissonant as a Schoenberg symphony, and a nightmarish impression of how the writer experienced both reality and performance. — Sebastian Doggart, The Telegraph, 21 May 2010
The Arbor, by Clio Barnard, is a remarkable film: conceptually acute, brilliantly realised, impossibly sad. — Sukdhev Sandhu, The Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2010
The actors are puppets of sorts, reminders of the hands behind the film, and the impossibility of miming perfectly reminds us that they’re reporting, not reconstructing. — Dave Calhoun, Time Out, 21 October 2010
Artist/filmmaker Barnard is daring: actors lip-synch to recordings of Dunbar’s loved ones, while archive footage shows the real playwright. Inbetween, The Arbor is staged on her estate. It shouldn’t work, but it does: an artsy yet accessible insight into working-class life. Moving, bold, unconventional and impeccably staged, The Arbor is a worthy tribute to a powerfully artistic voice. — Anna Smith, Empire Magazine, October 2010
Lorraine's testimony is incredibly important. There's such complexity around race for her and how difficult it was for her. [...] In some ways it's a film about Lorraine, rather than a film about Andrea. – Clio Barnard in conversation with Gareth Evans at an online event hosted by the London Review of Books, 17 June 2020
Credits
Presented by Artangel and UK Film Council in association with Jerwood Foundation, Arts Council England and More4. The Arbor is included in The Artangel Collection, a national initiative to commission and present new film and video work, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
Artangel is generously supported by Arts Council England and the private patronage of the Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.
