IT
| Original Title | Motherboard |
|---|---|
| Movie Type | Feature |
| Genre | |
| Section | |
| Country | UK |
| Production Year | 2024 |
| Movie Length | 90' |
| Director | |
| Screenplay | |
| Director of Photography | |
| Editor | |
| Animation | |
| Music | Cole Porter Ed Seed War |
| Sound Designer | John Wakefield |
| Produced by | Victoria Mapplebeck |
| Production | First Person Films, United Kingdom), www.firstpersonfilms.co.uk |
| International Distribution | |
| Festival Contact |
MOTHERBOARD
MOTHERBOARD is a feature documentary exploring motherhood, filmed over 20 years by BAFTA award-winning British director Victoria Mapplebeck. At the age of 38, Victoria found herself single, pregnant and broke. Unable to combine motherhood with freelance directing, she was forced to abandon her career in TV, instead turning the camera on herself and her son, Jim. Victoria first began documenting their lives with her old DVCAM before shooting almost daily on five generations of smartphones, from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 15. She recorded hundreds of hours of footage, capturing each twist and turn in Jim’s life, from the thumbs-up he gave her during her first scan, to his first day at college.
As Jim grows up, Victoria charts the trials, traumas and occasional triumphs of their single parent family. “
Victoria Mapplebeck is a BAFTA-winning artist and director, specializing in film, VR, and immersive audio. Her work often explores autobiographical narratives, addressing universal themes of technology, parenting, health, and well-being.
MOTHERBOARD is a smartphone feature documentary. Over the last decade, Mapplebeck has extensively used smartphones for filming, driven by her belief in their innovative and intimate capabilities. Her smartphone short films include 160 CHARACTERS (2015), which received a Vimeo Staff Pick, and MISSED CALL (2017). MISSED CALL notably won Best Short Form Programme at the 2019 BAFTAs and Best Documentary Short at the 2019 Broadcast Digital Awards. In 2021, she co-founded and co-curated Smart, The London International Smartphone Film Festival.
Mapplebeck has consistently explored new technologies. Her VR project, THE WAITING ROOM VR (2019), which tells the story of her breast cancer, premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival and won The IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling. In 2021, she wrote and directed TESTING TIMES, an immersive audio experience that premiered at IDFA.
Victoria is a Professor of Digital Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, a BAFTA member, and a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Conversation on topics such as gender parity in creative industries and advancements in immersive storytelling.
Director's Note
MOTHERBOARD begins with a personal story but it also tells a universal story. There are 3 million lone parent families in the UK, around 90% of those single parents are women. Motherboard shines a light on the power and agency of the many women who are raising children alone, by choice or by circumstance.
Motherhood as a story, is so infrequently told, because the world tells us that what mothers do is unremarkable and unimportant. A mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves… but about how she stays.
In recent TV drama, there has been a growing appetite amongst audiences for unfiltered, unromanticised portraits of parenting– especially the joy and pain of being a middle-aged single mum, ‘Better Things’, ‘Rain Dogs’ and ‘The Chair’ to name but a few.
We were once turned down by a Documentary Producer who told us that ‘Motherboard’ felt too “small” for him. He wanted “Big stories about true crime and space…..Epic journeys ”. I replied, “Raising my son alone.. him meeting his dad for the first time and how we both survived the fall out of my breast cancer diagnosis … that’s been a pretty epic journey…”.
Why are stories which explore how women navigate the world, at all stages of life, often described as ‘small’? ‘Motherboard’ is shot on small cameras in small spaces, but it explores big, relatable stories with a huge reach. I hope that ‘Motherboard’ is proof that epic journeys can begin and end at home. “