‘Mum, I can't think straight any more': the mother who filmed her son's entire childhood

The Guardian

4 days ago

There's a scene in the documentary Motherboard in which life as a lone parent is very much going off the rails. While film-maker Victoria Mapplebeck is having treatment for breast cancer, her 14-year-old son Jim is partying hard and refusing to do his homework. After a huge row, he storms out. His mother recorded their subsequent phone call. 'When he said he couldn't wait to be old enough to move out, that was like a dagger through the heart,' she says. 'That cancer year was when life's difficult stuff was happening and I was filming the process all at the same time.'
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Back in 2004, when Mapplebeck found herself pregnant after a short romance with a man who wasn't keen on being a father, she was all too aware of the Cyril Connolly quote about there being no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall. 'So I trained my camera on that pram in order to find a way to combine life as a film-maker and a mother,' she says. Filmed over 20 years on a succession of phones, Motherboard is a doc that comes with equal amounts of jeopardy, trauma and humour.
We first meet Jim as a foetus on an ultrasound screen, giving his mum-to-be the thumbs up. Over the following 90 minutes we see him grow into a warm-hearted young man with a gift for comedy. As a longitudinal project, the film has been compared to Michael Apted's influential 1964 TV series Seven Up!, which followed the same 14 children over the years to see how their lives changed. It has also been likened to Richard Linklater's 2014 coming-of-age feature Boyhood, made over 12 years with the same actors. But where those films were made by invisible directors seamlessly stitching together a narrative, Motherboard puts Mapplebeck centre frame with Jim, and shows her toggling between being a parent and a film-maker.
Mapplebeck was a 38-year-old freelance TV director when she became pregnant. As this was hardly the most financially stable of jobs, she moved into teaching when she realised she would be bringing up a baby up on her own. As an innovator who had made the first C4 webcam series, Smart Hearts, back in 1999, her experience with virtual reality, self-shooting and using iPhones as cameras led to her becoming professor of digital media at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Realising she missed film-making, Mapplebeck made the 2015 short 160 Characters, about the relationship that had led to Jim's conception, using old text messages found on her redundant Nokia phone. 160 Characters was followed by another short, Missed Call, about Jim's wish when he was 13 to meet his absent father. That film won a Bafta in 2019, but footage of the two of them going up on stage to collect the award doesn't tell the whole story. Mapplebeck had been undergoing treatment for breast cancer and was worried she wouldn't live long enough to see Jim grow up.
She had already started filming her year-long treatment as a VR project for the Guardian: 'I've always looked at painful experiences through a lens and on the whole it's helped. With cancer, you've got no control over it and you have to lean into that. It's not about whether you've got a positive attitude as to what your outcome is, it's in the lap of the gods. I wanted some sense of agency and decided to document this whole year of cancer treatment and explore its effect on family life.'
Jim wasn't sure at first: 'Even if I was putting myself in her shoes, it still didn't make sense. But what I slowly learned was that for every person, therapy looks very different. And I realised that putting a camera in front of it was my mum's way of getting through it. I saw how positive it was for her, so then I was backing it.'
Jim is now 21 and studying drama at university. He still lives in the south London flat his mother moved into before he was born. Closely involved with the film-making process throughout, he is credited as creative consultant on Motherboard. Talking alongside his mother, he remembers the 18-month edit: 'It was quite a funny time because I'd have my life and you'd have yours. And I'd come back home and it'd be pitch black; you'd just been so busy all the lights would be off except the illuminated screen. And you would go, 'Oh, could you watch this?' I was regularly watching cuts and giving feedback about what I did and didn't like. It was really cool.'
Mapplebeck is at pains to stress the care taken to ensure that making the film didn't add to Jim's worries about the future: 'The bad stuff and the very difficult moments, they're not recorded live. And that was a very conscious decision. I didn't come back from the oncologist and say to Jim, 'OK, this is the diagnosis', with the camera in his face. All of that is off-camera. But then days, weeks later, we'd record a kind of recap. I always felt it was a myth that it's only going to be good if it's live and you're doorstepping. Having a bit of time to reflect made for really good material.'
Jim comes through as a natural performer, whether singing his made-up songs as a charming toddler or acting in a school play. He admits: 'I like being the main character – as an actor that is nice. And I feel lucky we can talk honestly.'
Not everything seen on screen was filmed by Mapplebeck. Snatches of Jim's life outside their flat – wading through muddy music festivals or partying with his friends – come from footage shot on his phone. Jim remembers: 'Mum would be like, 'Oh, could I get this?' And it was nice including a lot of my friends because they will always be a very big part of my life, especially those years.'
Motherboard also weaves in telephone calls and texts between mother and son, even when their relationship is at its most fraught during the cancer treatment and Covid restriction years. At one point Jim texts: 'I can't think straight any more, this year needs to fuck off'. Unlike mom influencers with their 'sharenting' videos that stream their children's antics almost-live online – and too often without their consent – Mapplebeck makes it clear that there were lengthy negotiations between her and Jim: 'There were three years of showing Jim cuts. Asking, 'What do you think? How would you feel about using this?'' She would put the phone in selfie mode and film them talking side by side: 'You see us going back and forth about consent. There was the scene where Jim says, 'Nineteen minutes you've been recording. Nineteen minutes gone! You're a thief!''
They agree that the toughest discussions were about using that phone call, recorded after their biggest argument: 'You had stormed out and I didn't know where you were and you were supposed to be going to your grandma's and it was pre-vaccine. I was worried you'd infect her and you were screaming, 'Shut up, shut up!' It's so visceral. Both of us knew it was really powerful. You kept on saying to me, 'I think that people might hate me when they hear me talk to you like that.''
But at a test screening, Jim was reassured that the scene worked in the way that his mother intended: 'It was quite a rite of passage because I think Jim really felt the love in the room. And he realised that people have either been that teenager or they've been that parent – or both – and that everybody got it. Nobody was judgmental or down on him, and that was a real turning point. Jim said to me, 'You can't make a film about parenting unless you show the shit stuff.''
'People can say I did the film to please my mum,' adds Jim, 'but there was no devil on my shoulder saying, 'Do this for her.' If I hadn't wanted to do the film, it wouldn't have happened.'
Mapplebeck received guidance from OKRE (Opening Knowledge across Research and Entertainment) about protecting Jim, as well as legal advice on ensuring his father's anonymity on screen. 'I would not want internet sleuthery and I've never been interested in naming or shaming, or even being judgmental of his decisions. It was a real lightbulb moment for me when I thought, 'I don't want to try and get into his head.'
'I will never understand his own experiences and what led him to these decisions. The advice we've always had from lawyers and compliance people has been: 'Yes, you can tell your story. You've got a right to your truth, a truthful and honest account of how this situation affected you.''
A 2013 study found that 13% of fathers report having no contact with their children. Jim was 14 by the time he met his dad. They saw each other three times that year, and haven't met since. Jim expresses ambivalence about him: 'I don't hate him at all. Don't even dislike him. I just have a very neutral view, which is that he did what he did in his life. I've done what I've done in my life. I don't want him to watch the film and regret anything. We all make choices, and I think, yeah, he might someday think that wasn't the best choice, but I wouldn't want him to feel like he should regret anything he's done. I know I've got a dad out there, but I am very, very happy with my current family and there's no guarantee that I would be who I was if he was in my life.'
Motherboard is at selected cinemas from 15 August