Programme Notes: Clio Barnard

I remember vividly the first Clio Barnard film I saw, because it’s one of the times I’ve cried most in the cinema. I grew up in Bradford, where several of Barnard’s films are set, and when her second feature The Selfish Giant (2013, Dir. Clio Barnard) was released, I had just moved to London. I was in my early twenties and had arrived in the capital with vague ideas about making something of myself (the idea of staying in Bradford to make something of myself, had not really crossed my mind). I went to see the film at the smallest screen of the BFI Southbank, on a drizzly weekday evening, and was stopped in my tracks.

On the surface The Selfish Giant is a simple, coming of age story, but it’s also crucially a film about neglect: underfunding, austerity and stolen futures. Somehow, the film dislodged something buried and unacknowledged, a deep-seated homesickness and, also, a roiling frustration, curdling into anger, at the disconnect between the shiny full-of-itself city I was now living in, and the story unfolding on screen. The landscapes and accents of The Selfish Giant were totally familiar to me, the windy moors and flattened vowels comforting but distant. Standing alone on the Southbank in the week night drizzle, I struggled to catch my breath. It took a good while to get myself together and back home.

You don’t have to have a personal connection like this to feel strongly about Barnard’s work. Her filmmaking superpower is radical empathy, a deep human warmth which allows her to translate sometimes bleak stories, soaked in real injustices and inequalities, into transcendent cinema. Barnard is often described as a social realist, yet her films are also full of quiet magic, allegory, poetry and romance. She makes work firmly rooted in the conditions and compromises of contemporary Britain, stories about (and often made collaboratively with) real people. At the same time, they are alchemical experiments which seek to transform that reality into art, politics into people.

Her first feature, The Arbor (2010, Dir. Clio Barnard) blends documentary and fiction to tell the story of the playwright Andrea Dunbar. Dunbar, best known for her play Rita, Sue and Bob Too (later adapted into a 1987 film directed by Alan Clarke), grew up in poverty on a Bradford housing estate. She was a teenage prodigy whose first play was produced at London’s prestigious Royal Court Theatre when she was just 18, but that early promise gave way to chronic alcoholism. She died at just 29 from a brain haemorrhage, leaving behind two children whose lives were irrevocably shaped by their traumatic childhood.

In The Arbor, Barnard translates this dark family saga into a dazzling work of hybrid storytelling. Actors, standing in sets based on real locations in Dunbar’s life, lip-sync to recorded interviews with the playwright’s family, to eerie, séance-like effect. Alongside these reconstructions, a mix of actors and local residents act out scenes from Dunbar’s play The Arbor on the housing estate where the writer lived, and archive footage offers brief glimpses of the real Dunbar at work. The result is a sort of conjuring, a multi-voiced portrait of a complicated woman, viewed from many perspectives. At the same time, The Arbor also frames the Dunbar family within the wider world of the estate, charting how this working class community has been shaped and fractured over time by post-industrial neglect.

The Arbor set a pattern for Barnard’s filmmaking. Although her subsequent features are more straightforward formally, rooted more clearly in fiction, her work often emerges from real relationships and encounters which blur boundaries between the lived and the imagined. Both The Selfish Giant and Ali & Ava (2021, Dir. Clio Barnard), are stories based on people Barnard met while making The Arbor, were produced in close community collaboration and star local people in key roles. This loose Bradford trilogy offers a cumulative multi-dimensional portrait of the city over time: from the ruthless individualism of the Thatcherite 1980s, through hollow New Labour optimism, into the divisive post-Brexit fallout.

In Barnard’s films, political conditions are rarely foregrounded, but instead tick away in the background, just like they do most of the time in our real lives. Yet crucially, while Barnard doesn’t varnish the real problems faced by inner-city working class communities, she is also eager to show us beauty, to remind us of the inherent resilience of the people we are watching. Ali & Ava, which centres on a cross-cultural love story between a white woman with Irish roots and a British Asian man, is perhaps the clearest example of this, a joyful depiction of multi-cultural urban life which Barnard has described as a direct response to the trauma of Brexit. “I really wanted to make something that celebrated Bradford and showed you how beautiful it is,” Barnard told me in 2021, when I interviewed her for Sight & Sound. “It felt like an important time to celebrate that.”

Although they might appear initially like a stylistic departure, Barnard’s literary adaptations share the deeply felt human-centred approach which defines her filmmaking. Dark River (2017, Dir. Clio Barnard), loosely translates Rose Tremain’s novel Trespass from southern France to rural Yorkshire, drawing on Ted Hughes’ poetry and interviews with forensic psychologists to depict a woman confronting familial trauma on her family farm. The upcoming I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning (2026, Dir. Clio Barnard), based on a book by Kieran Goddard, is the keenly observed story of five childhood friends from Birmingham, whose lives as adults are pulled in different directions by the practical realities of the gig economy and the housing crisis. Described in one review as a “humanist light show,” Barnard’s latest proves she’s not lost sight of the burning, brilliant, human-centred filmmaking with which she made her name. And let’s be honest; that’s just the kind of cinema we need right now.