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. 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

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. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Journey Strand - World premiere

Director: Luca Anzalone

Year: 2026

Caught between her indigenous Buryat roots—where art is a shamanic window between worlds—and a Western market that treats culture as a commodity, artist Yuma Radne constructs a monumental canvas to confront the psychological distortions of colonization at the edge of an irreversible era. "Either you make art, or you suffer. It’s like a curse." For painter Yuma Radne, the act of creation is not an aesthetic choice, but an ancestral code carried in the blood. Moving from a remote Siberian village to the high-stakes European art world, Yuma finds herself navigating a surreal landscape where sacred cultural identity is rapidly converted into a luxury product. Through intimate studio dialogues and raw philosophical reflections, the film captures the gruelling physical and mental labour behind her graduation masterpiece, The End of Times. Centred around a gargantuan erupting booze (a traditional Buryat dumpling) mutated into an absurd, monumental symbol of a colonised and erased national identity, the film transcends a typical artist portrait. It becomes a vital, cosmic meditation on why humanity continues to create art in the face of systemic collapse—and a powerful testament to an indigenous culture refusing to be reduced to a souvenir.