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.”
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.
