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Project Detail

Motherboard

Synopsis

A smartphone feature exploring motherhood, filmed over 20 years by BAFTA award-winning British director Victoria Mapplebeck. At the age of 38, Victoria Mapplebeck found herself single, pregnant and broke. Unable to combine motherhood with freelance directing, she was forced to abandon her career in TV, instead turning the camera on herself and her son, Jim. Victoria first began documenting their lives with her old DVCAM before shooting almost daily on five generations of smartphones, from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 15. She recorded hundreds of hours of footage, capturing each twist and turn in Jim’s life, from the thumbs-up he gave her during her first scan, to his first day at college.
MOTHERBOARD is a complex, personal and unsentimental portrait of a mother-son relationship from birth to adulthood, exploring the ways in which Victoria and Jim navigate two generations of absent fathers and Victoria’s breast cancer diagnosis when Jim was just 13. The warm, playful and sometimes strained relationship between Victoria and Jim plays out against a backdrop of family life unfiltered.
MOTHERBOARD is the antidote to the judgmental and unrealistic expectations we have about motherhood, creating an honest, funny and relatable film for any mother who has wept tears of both joy and frustration.
Official selection CPH:DOX Film Festival 2024 - World Premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024
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Details

Year
2024
Type of project
Features
Running time
87 min
Format
Smartphone 4K
Director
Victoria Mapplebeck 1st Feature
Producer
Victoria Mapplebeck
Executive Producer
Debbie Manners
Editor
Victoria Mapplebeck, Oli Bauer; Assistant Editor: Anton Yavorsky
Director of Photography
Victoria Mapplebeck; Additional Camera: Mark Hammond, Jim Mapplebeck, Shira Finch
Sound
John Wakefield
Composer
Jamie Perera
Creative Consultant
Jim Mapplebeck

Genre

Woman Director

Categories

Documentary

Production Status

Complete

Production Company

First Person Films

2nd Floor Waverley House
7-12 Noel Street
London 
W1F 8GQ

Sales Company

Autlook Filmsales

Spittelberggasse 3/14
1070 Vienna
Austria

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See also

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Biography