4 days ago
Lollipop: A 'timely' film about the realities of the social care system
A decade ago Daisy-May Hudson picked up her camera and started documenting her family's life.
She, her mother and her 13-year-old sister had just lost their home.
Priced out of the rental market, they were living in hostels and halfway houses while they fought layers of bureaucracy to try and get rehoused.
The resulting documentary, Half Way, announced the arrival of a major new filmmaking talent as well as showing the frustrations, tears and helplessness of people in her family's position.
Awarded the BAFTA Breakthrough accolade, she has now made her first feature film Lollipop, which deals with a mother fighting to regain custody of her children after they are taken into care while she is in prison.
The feelings of powerlessness she encountered amongst single mothers during screenings of Half Way, helped inform Hudson's decision to make a feature film, using people who had real life experience of the issues.
From women she met during the making of Holloway, her documentary about former inmates of Holloway women's prison, to a script supervisor who herself lost her son into the care system just days after he was born, Lollipop is an emotional and powerful study of the realities of mothers separated from their children, while offering no judgement of the parties involved.
For Hudson and script supervisor Emilia Rose Porter, Lollipop presents the system as it is, and asks if this is what the viewer thinks it should be be.
Porter uses her experience to help those working in the social care industries, sharing the story of how a difficult private life and mental health issues meant she had to fight to get her son back and turn her life around.
She succeeded, and is grateful to Hudson for giving people like her visibility, she says.
With increasing awareness of the negative impact on children caused by maternal imprisonment, Lollipop is timely.
Now the film is about to get a lot more visibility. Next week it is being released in UK cinemas.
