When Nottingham-based Lisa Selby, an artist and university lecturer, started documenting her relationship with her estranged mother Helen on camera, she had no plans to turn the footage into a documentary feature.
Blue Bag Life has gone on to win the audience award at the BFI London Film Festival and Hainan International Film Festival, plus the Golden Alexander at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
“It was never meant to be a film,” recalls Selby. “I was taking photographs in Helen’s house and writing loads. It was a way of looking at things from lots of different angles and processing.”
Helen had left Selby with her father when she was a child, while Helen lived a chaotic life of global travel and drug use.
Selby has been “filming everything for as long as I remember”. As an adult, she re-established some contact with Helen, and started filming their conversations. Selby’s partner, Elliot Murawski, was dealing with a heroin addiction, which she captured on tape and charted on an Instagram account, Blue Bag Life.
It was through this Instagram account that Selby met Rebecca Lloyd-Evans and Josie Cole in 2019, who were working on a BBC podcast series about the lives of families with relatives in prison, Prison Bag. Cole’s own husband was incarcerated for fraud.
“We interviewed Lisa for the podcast. We were supposed to be together for an hour, and we ended up going to the pub and drinking non-alcoholic drinks for hours,” recalls Lloyd-Evans.
Selby had already been approached by a television broadcaster to tell her story, but Lloyd-Evans offered a project with more creative control. “The only way we could do this project was as a team,” says Lloyd-Evans.
“It’s such a strange and isolating experience,” adds Cole, of her own husband’s prison experience. “If someone else is going through that, you have a real bond. Lisa really trusted me.” Before funding had been set up, Selby had handed over boxes of hard drives brimming with personal materials to Lloyd-Evans and Cole.
Flattening the hierarchy
“I can’t go back to working in my old way,” says Lloyd-Evans, whose credits include The Guardian: Documentaries and The Uncertain Kingdom. “This is the way forward for documentaries.”
From the offset, Lloyd-Evans knew she wanted to make the film as a true collaboration. Blue Bag Life dispensed with a traditional production hierarchy, bringing in Selby as a co-director, as well as giving the editor, Alexander Fry, a co-director credit. Selby also has a writing credit, alongside Cole, with Natasha Dack Ojumu of Tigerlily Productions joining as a producer, having worked with Lloyd-Evans previously on a film for UK children’s channel CBBC about kids with parents in prison.
Modern Films picked the title following the win at the BFI London Film Festival, with Dack Ojumu dealing directly with Modern Films’ CEO Eve Gabereau. It will be released theatrically in the UK and Ireland from April 7.
All five are credited as filmmakers at the start of the film, with everyone on the same fees, and focuses on transparency of budget – financing came from BFI Doc Society in 2021 and a pre-buy from Storyville in 2022 – and duty of care, budgeting in therapy as an option for all crew and contributors.
“We are trying to readdress what we see as a wrong in the documentary industry and film industry. Films are not made by one person. It’s not one director whose vision is the thing you end up seeing. Every person’s contribution is what makes the film,” says Lloyd-Evans. “The whole industry is structured on the director, whose name is put everywhere. That’s how you get your next funding off the ground, that’s how you apply to the film festivals.”
“We don’t recognise editors in the industry,” she observes. “It’s only the directors who get credited everywhere. I’ve worked with Alex for enough films and watched that happen to him time and time again. An editor is a director, how can you pick that apart? We want to ask the industry to re-think how it is that we credit and acknowledge who it is that really makes films.”
“As an editor you have incredible power, but it’s a hidden power. It’s an ego-less role. For many years, I liked that I was doing it for the work,” says Fry. “But over time, I started to feel like – hold on a sec, I feel like I’m at least 40, 50% responsible for how this film turned out.
“By flattening the hierarchy, there’s an agency that everyone gains,” believes Fry. “It’s a bit like in a company where all employees have a stake, there’s an incredible cohesion that results from that.”
“Some people would have a problem with working in this way,” says Dack Ojumu. “I’ve got some fiction features coming up, it won’t work on those films, but I think it is more achievable in documentary.”
Subject as filmmaker
The team believes firmly the subject of a documentary deserves financial compensation for their involvement. “We’ve got this extractivist model inherent in documentary filmmaking,” says Lloyd-Evans. “We can’t make work like that anymore. This is a very specific case because Lisa is such an artist, but there have got to be ways of rethinking people being involved in telling their own story.”
“I was going through IVF and Elliot went into hospital during filmmaking,” adds Selby. “I didn’t feel like my life was being interrupted, or I was on show. I didn’t feel like I was in my most vulnerable state and people were trying to grab material. I had ownership. I would never show anyone my cooking, because it’s embarrassing, or me and Elliot sitting watching Love Island. I have those moments for myself.”
“The culture of documentary making I grew up in, you keep them [the subject] away from the story, you keep them away from the edit, and you don’t pay them any money. That feels so immoral to me now. I’m going to be paid, it’s my career. Why should someone’s lived experience not be paid?” questions Lloyd-Evans.
“I think it’s quite an old-fashioned view [to not pay the documentary’s subject],” says Dack Ojumu. “There’s a concern that you might be compromising your journalistic integrity. But at the same time, if you’re asking somebody to give up huge amounts of their time in their own life and you’re getting paid for filming that but they’re not getting paid for participating, there’s definitely a conversation to be had about recompense for that person. Lisa was paid as a member of our team, and was paid for the use of her archive.”
“It’s keeping money in one place,” insists Lloyd-Evans, “and it’s not allowing money to filter to people who have lived through quite complicated things. Lived experience isn’t being valued.”
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