EXCLUSIVE: UK filmmaker Daisy-May Hudson, the director of Lollipop, a feature about a woman’s fight to keep her children after being released from prison, is heading to parliament to discuss the real-world issues raised in her film and campaign for change, alongside Labour member of parliament (MP) Jess Asato.
The panel discussion will take place on January 13 at Portcullis House in Westminster, with the aim of discussing opportunities for policy change while watching key scenes from Lollipop.
Hudson and Asato will be joined by members of the cast including Posy Sterling, Idil Ahmed and Sherma Polidore, who appeared in the film and is also a family court barrister, as well as Kirsty Kitchen, the director of charity and campaign group Birth Companions Institute (which works to support pregnant women and mothers and babies in complex situations) and individuals with lived experience.
The session will focus on urgent issues related to maternal imprisonment, children’s social care, the family courts, housing provision, and intergenerational cycles of trauma and harm.
“The next step of the film’s journey into Parliament feels so powerful because we are using it to motivate policy change,” said Hudson. “Not just empathy, but actual change in society that can create holistic systems which care for people – and generational healing in our communities. Film has the power to make that type of significant change – because you’re not just explaining facts and figures, you’re allowing someone to step so deeply into the feeling of someone else’s experience that they have to act.”
Lollipop world premiered at Edinburgh film festival in 2024 and had a limited release by Met Film in UK-Ireland in the summer. It will air on BBC Two and be available on BBC iPlayer from January 16.
Sterling, who won the British Independent Film Award (Bifa) for breakthrough performer for her role earlier this month, plays a woman named Molly, released from prison after serving four months. She assumes it will be a matter of hours before she can pick up her children from foster care. Instead, she finds herself unable to get housing because she doesn’t have her kids living with her, but unable to get them back without a roof over her head. Cut off from the system, she must turn to the help of a childhood friend for survival.
The film was backed by BBC Film and BFI and produced by Parkville Pictures, and sold by Architect.
“Seeing Molly and her children so powerfully portrayed in Lollipop really resonated with me and I immediately saw the parallels between their catch-22 situation and ones I hear about up and down the country on a daily basis,” said Asato. “The film is a valuable tool for politicians and people who have power to effect change to see the direct impact current policy is having on Mothers and families.”
Kirsty Kitchen, director of Birth Companions Institute, added: “We’re incredibly excited to be taking Lollipop into Parliament with Daisy-May and other members of the team behind this incredible film, because of the important stories it tells about mothering in such difficult and hostile systems.”
“I wrote Lollipop without blame,” noted Hudson, ”speaking to lived experiences advisors from every part of the system so we could have a transparent and compassionate discussion over whether this system is the very best we can do. When people feel blamed, defences go up, when people feel understood, connection can happen and we can open a healthy and transparent discussion about whether the system as it stands works, and whether we happy with it.”
Hudson’s credits also include 2015 documentary Half Way which captured her own family’s experiences of homelessness over a two-year period, and is a co-director with Sophie Compton on feature documentary Holloway, about six former inmates of a female prison, which won the documentary audience award at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
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