ARTIST'S CHOICE | THE ARBOR

Artist Clio Barnard's moving film about the late Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar is an intriguing mix of interviews with Dunbar's family and friends, scenes from her plays, and TV footage of Dunbar in the 1980s.

Andrea Dunbar, a tenacious young playwright whose work was described as 'Thatcher's Britain with its knickers down', grew up on the notorious Buttershaw Estate in Bradford. It was there that she wrote her three plays The Arbor, Rita, Sue and Bob Too and Shirley, had her three children, and died prematurely, at the age of 29, in 1990. Clio Barnard's film The Arbor follows Dunbar's oldest daughter Lorraine as she is introduced to her mother’s plays and letters. Barnard spent two years interviewing members of the Dunbar family and local residents before creating an audio screenplay that was lip-synched by actors. The result, as Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian, is ‘a new kind of ‘verbatim cinema’ ... a modernist, compassionate biopic.’

The Arbor will be introduced by Falmouth-based artist and writer Dr Neil Chapman, who describes it as ‘a film with a subtle politics developed in an innovative way’.

Thursday 29 January
CAST Café supper from 6pm
Tickets from £15, booking essential

The Arbor, directed by Clio Barnard, 2010. Production still of Girl (Natalie Gavin) in a scene from Andrea Dunbar’s play, The Arbor, performed on Brafferton Arbor. Photograph: Nick Wall. The Arbor is part of The Artangel Collection, an initiative to bring outstanding film and video works, commissioned and produced by Artangel, to galleries and museums across the UK.