Karlovy Vary 2010: Clio Barnard’s The Arbor

With The Arbor, artist Clio Barnard is making her feature directorial debut. The Arbor is a uniquely constructed documentary of the life of the play write Andrea Dunbar, who wrote her first play, “The Arbor”, at the of 15, and even though her plays were successful (one of them was even made into a film, entitled “Rita, Sue, and Bob too”), she died of alcoholism at the criminally young age of 29. The doc’s main feature is the choice made by Barnard to record interviews with friends and family of the late Dunbar, and then hire actors to lip synch to the recorded material. It’s all shot in the original settings of Dunbar’s life and to top it off, selected scenes from the doc are being acted out on the street, while the neighbors watch curiously. Finally, rare archive footage of Andrea Dunbar herself is incorporated into the documentary is a real treat.

Andrea Dunbar wrote about the difficult lives of the lower/working class English men and women, and the doc’s aim is to show that nothing has changed. As long as the film follows Dunbar’s life story, The Arbor remains an engaging and highly effective film. The second half mostly follows the life of one of Dunbar’s daughters — as she too is on her own destructive downward spiral battling drug addiction and prostitution. It just goes to state that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Despite being a little repetitive and redundant in the second half, this Tribeca preemed doc is an exciting, smart, and original.