The Waiting Room

Director: Victoria Mapplebeck

Year: 2024

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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> Official selection CPH:DOX Film Festival 2024 - World Premiere<br /> Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024

Director: Victoria Mapplebeck

Year: 2015

When a vintage Nokia mobile phone is recharged, a compelling real life story is revealed, in this mixed media documentary short.<br /> Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Journey Strand - World premiere

Director: Hannah Berryman

Year: 2024

A landmark feature documentary about astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot and command the Space Shuttle.<br /> Eileen’s incredible journey starts with her smalltown beginnings, sees her smash through many glass ceilings, and culminates in four dramatic space shuttle missions, the last being possibly the most dangerous and most important of them all.<br /> At its heart the film is the moving human drama of one family, where a mother’s extraordinary career takes us straight to the big philosophical question of what is the level of acceptable risk in human endeavour? <br /> This film celebrates Commander Collins’ trailblazing NASA career which opened the way for women to become spacecraft pilots and commanders, and proved a perfect riposte to a previous generation of male astronauts who thought there was no place for women to lead the way in space. <br /> Official Selection DOC NYC 2024 - World premiere<br /> Official Selection CPH:DOX 2025 - European premiere