Life of a single mom: Motherboard documentary screens at One World
As a part of the ongoing One World documentary festival that took place in Prague last week and is scheduled to run in Czech cities until April 27th, I had the opportunity to interview Victoria Mapplebeck, an award-winning director and artist recognized by BAFTA. She showcased her documentary "Motherboard" at the festival.
Long before vlogging became a cultural phenomenon, Victoria was documenting her experiences as a single mother with her camera and iPhone. Over the span of 20 years, she successfully captured her son Jim's challenges and triumphs as he dealt with the issues of an absent father throughout the process of growing up.
This is your last day in Prague. How do you feel after the screening?
“Relieved, actually. You never quite know how an audience is going to respond to it. Debbie and I tend to sit in, on every single screening because every screening just has a slightly different atmosphere. And the questions - you do get the same kind of questions, but then there's always somebody who comes in with something quite different. So, yeah, it's really enjoyable. I'm proud to have it as part of the One World Festival and finished because it's been a labour of love. It's gone on for many, many, years.”
At what point did you decide that you were going to make this footage into a documentary? Was there a precise moment?
“ I had started off writing a short story and then that became a 40,000-word memoir about raising my son, Jim, alone. And, actually, that was a really good starting point to have for a documentary because in a way I'd worked out a lot of the storylines. And the other starting point for the film was the text messages in a vintage Nokia that were between myself and my son's dad and realising, oh, actually, I think there's a film story in just the text messages. Because in a way, it was a film that was about how we use and abuse technologies and phones, it seemed to make sense to bring it to life with a smartphone. And Sean Baker had just made the amazing Tangerine on the iPhone 6 and then that became a real inspiration for me. So, that was the point that I started to turn it into a film and that would be the year 2014. We've been filming and in production on and off for a decade.”
When did you decide that you were going to tell Jim that you're making this into a film? Because there's all these cute little authentic moments between you guys and I'm assuming that he didn't know about that when he was very little.
“The footage when he's very little, is in a way his home movie footage, which then I use as an archive. But the moment from when the smartphone filmmaking began, he would be 12 and absolutely he knew that I was making a film and he really enjoyed it. He didn't enjoy it all the way through, but he very much enjoyed it when he was that age because he's an extrovert and he likes acting up to the camera, and I would make it fun. The other thing about smartphone footage is I'd maybe do 10 minutes of conversation with him and then film him playing football. So, it's a very light touch. It's not like a big camera and a crew. And he very much knew from age 12 when I started making the films that I was making a film. I couldn't disguise that.”
I think that you can definitely see that he likes being on camera and interviewed a lot of the time and he's actually very good at it. My next question is, do you feel like it ever took you out of the present moment because you would think about, I need to capture this moment, for example, to have it be part of the footage?
“That's a really good observation, but in a way that's what filmmakers are thinking about all the time. Jim will sometimes joke with me, “why can't you just live your life, mum?” But I am constantly saying, oh, this would make such a good scene and damn, why haven't I gotten this shot? And one of the arts of filmmaking, and I teach filmmaking as well, is when you've got to recreate past stories where you didn't get the footage at the time. And there's a real art to doing that. You know, Werner Herzog does it amazingly and was a real inspiration to me. But yeah, so either try and get it in the moment, but if you don't get it in the moment, there are creative ways to almost fictionalize that moment as if you did.”
Did you ever go back and take some of the footage from the weather outside and put that into the film later on?
“Yeah, because if you were completely wedded to the authentic timeline, I think it would get quite boring. It's interesting for Motherboard, the influences I had were really much more drama than they were documentary. And it's cut like a drama. And some of my favorite films are dramas where obviously you're fictionalizing timelines and thinking about the story. You know, I think in a way, not enough documentaries do think about story. They tend to lead with the issue. And of course there are issues in this film, about how we deal with cancer or long-term illness or motherhood, fatherhood, absent fatherhood, but it's character-led and story-led. And that's what I hope gives it something special.”
One last question. What are some projects that you are currently working on now that Jim is big and out of the house and you have more time to do creative things?
“ I still want to stay with a sort of autobiographical filmmaking. One of my favorite filmmakers is Agnès Varda who made films about her own life right the way into her seventies and her eighties. And I've just come up with an idea to try and document life for women in the domestic space where we're, particularly because we work from home so much, how you kind of constantly plate spin between work and domestic duties. And so I'm going to get one of those police bodycam cameras and just wear it at home. And hopefully it will give a sense of the madness that is women's lives in the domestic space. So that's the next project that we're working on.”
