Innovative and brilliantly done. The actors lip-synching were excellent. It's not a happy tale but very moving and sad. It's the real sequel to Rita, Sue and Bob too you could say.

I was interested to see what would be the effect of actors lip-syncing to real interviews. The answer? Not that much really. Not sure the film-makers used the technique to its full potential, so you still felt like an unalloyed voyeur on misery. The excerpts from the plays, performed on the estate with everyone watching, were very effective though.

Interesting, though it does border on prevention from time to time.

The Arbor is a emi-documentary with lip-syncing actors over real voices, scenes played out on a council estate, and news clips about the life and times of Andrea Dunbar, a "genius from the slums" and author of THE ARBOR and RITA, SUE & BOB TOO. She wrote her first play, which was performed at the Royal Court Theatre London, when she was just 15, and she died at 29 in the local pub, leaving behind three children from three diferent different fathers to grow up as best they coucld (and in the case of one, this was not very well at all.) Unusal, compelling, tragic, depressing, tedious, and not for everyone, but very interesting.

I had never heard of Andrea Dunbar, the playwright and subject of The Arbor, before watching this film. Dunbar's own tragic life was one that saw her gain recognition for her art early in her writing career, and then struggle with heavy alcohol use and violence until her eventual death. She wrote three plays before she died, the first of which the film takes its title from. But director Clio Barnard's interest in Dunbar's story is not in her career, at least, not on the surface, but on her relationships with her children. And that story is a devastatingly sad account of a cycle of parental neglect. Barnard focuses on the relationship between Dunbar and her eldest daughter, Lorraine, who was only ten when Dunbar died at the age of 29. The film explores specifically the similarities between the two women's lives, and more generally, the cyclical nature of family violence and addiction. For that alone it is a fascinating and insightful film, if often tough to stomach. But one can't talk about this psuedo-documentary without commenting on the style. Barnard's interesting experiment involves shooting actors lip-syncing to the narrations of documentary interviews with Dunbar's family and community. Some may find the exercise distracting, or feel that it takes away from the subject matter, but given that the subject of the film was a playwright, it gives the entire execution a sort of metafilmic quality in that Dunbar's life is effectively turned into a play inside this documentary.

Not the kind of thing you'd expect from the image sensitive UK. I would not have enjoyed it in the theater as a lot of the dialog is completely unintelligible, but at home on a DVD you can stop and read the subtitles if you have to. The people it depicts are easily as hopeless as any you've seen in the US, if not more so. As a former teacher I was relieved to see how some of my own worst students weren't without precedent. It will definitely illuminate what it means to live in one of the UK's estates.

An Unconventional Telling of an All-Too-Common Story The only thing I knew about this documentary going in was that it was the story of a family, and that it was actors lip-synching recordings. I knew essentially nothing else. I'm not sure I'd ever heard of Andrea Dunbar. I've now read a synopsis of the one movie based on her work ([i]Rita, Sue and Bob Too[/i]), and I'm not particularly interested. As it happens, I've started several movies with similar thematic elements, and I seldom finish them. I seldom get more than about half an hour in before I get bored, frustrated, and/or angered and turn them off. Which means, I suppose, that if I had known more of the plot, I probably wouldn't have watched it. It would have been a shame, because this was intensely moving. It's really more the story of the daughters than the mother, who died in 1990 when the girls were children. The mother's story informs the daughters', but in many ways, it is the older daughter's story which is more compelling. Andrea Dunbar was a lower-class British girl. She grew up in the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford, West Yorkshire. When she was fifteen, she wrote a play called [i]The Arbor[/i]. It was produced, and Dunbar became a minor celebrity. Except in Buttershaw, where she wasn't exactly popular. Especially because she had a daughter with a Pakistani man, Yousaf (performed by Jimi Mistry). Lorraine (Manjinder Virk) grew up with a drunk mother and two half-siblings by two different fathers. One night, she overheard her mother telling a boyfriend that she never should have given birth to Lorraine, her biracial child, and that she didn't love her as much as she loved her white children. Lorraine, understandably, turned to drugs, especially after her mother died. She became a prostitute. She got pregnant and gave birth to a john's child. And one night, the baby ingested some of her methadone and died. It's easy to feel sorry for Lorraine, though there is some speculation that she deliberately gave the baby methadone. However, her stint in prison (manslaughter) at least did what it was supposed to do and got her to acknowledge that the baby's death was her fault even if it was an accident. She believes now that she will remain clean even if offered the opportunity to do heroin, because she knows that she chose her drugs over her baby. Either way, though, no child should ever see and hear what Lorraine saw and heard. She was also sexually abused as a child; if the baby hadn't been the john's, it is probable that she never would have had one, because sex has no real appeal to her. She is a scarred young woman, and she will never really be able to resolve her issues. She will never be able to confront her mother, no matter how much she wants to, because her mother died when she was young. Younger, in fact, than her mother had been when she was born. These things do tend to repeat themselves. Lorraine had good foster parents (Monica Dolan and Neil Dudgeon), but in a way, they were too late. The damage had been done to Lorraine before they got her. Lorraine's sister, Lisa (Christine Bottomley), believes that Lorraine is just exaggerating her problems, or at any rate isn't really so mad at their mother as she thinks she is, but in many ways, Lisa had it easier. For one, she was younger when she got out of the situation. For another, she wasn't the biracial child. Even if what Lorraine says isn't true, and Andrea never expressed regret, it's definitely true that it would not have been easy for Lorraine around the neighbourhood. The stories the characters tell are deeply compelling no matter how they are told, and the only reason their story is unusual is that Andrea Dunbar was someone. There is, for example, no Wikipedia page for the movie, but there is one for Andrea Dunbar. It is because we know who she is that we care about Lorraine and Lisa. The way the story is told could be distracting. Easily. After all, we're talking about lip-synching here. Lip-synching is often done very badly, which is one of the reasons it has the reputation it does. However, the other reason it has that reputation is that it is too often used to hide laziness in performing. In this case, however, I think the performing became more complicated because the actors were required to make it look as though the words were coming out of their own mouths. I don't know what Lorraine and Lisa Dunbar look like, because in my head, they look like the performers in this movie. In fact, the performances were so well lip-synched that, had I not gone in knowing that the actors weren't delivering their own lines, I would not have been able to pick up on it from watching the movie. I have seen much more distracting movies. I have failed to watch movies because they were much more distracting. This movie is best known for its filming technique, because it dances the line between documentary and biopic. But it deserves to be known for more than that.

The gimicky aspect of the miming for me only works on a hit and miss basis bit this is still a story that demands your attention. Andrea's daughter Lorraine in particular is a completely heart-breaking screen presence. Just an incredible, and incredibly awful story, you always kind of feel though that you wish the real people were up on screen.

Even after seeing the synopsis on Netflix that said something about lip-syncing, I still thought this was simply a documentary about a really messed up family that lives in the projects. Afterwards, when I saw a more fuller synopsis, and realized that the audio was all recorded from interviews with the actual family members, with the characters in the movie actually lip syncing to the audio, I was amazed. I've never seen a movie like this and it really was a testamant to the obviously extremely believable performances. Literally, I really did not know that they were lip syncing. Besides this inventive feature, the story of a violent, drug addicted family was fascinating. The camerwork, while subtle, was interesting because of the numerous angles the director used to make the story seem more exciting. A part that I liked the best probably, was the recreation of several scenes of Dunbar's plays on the arbor street, with sepctators crowding around to watch. Nonetheless, I came away from a movie with the feeling that this movie is very unique and was a fascinating step away from the documentary norm.

Almost oppressively grim at times, there's also quite a lot of interesting material about art imitating life and vice versa, as well as how much one's life is determined by a parent's choices.

Heart-rending, tearjerking,touching, moving, sad, poignant ... And beautifully unique docudrama.

A brilliant documentary that flows beautifully with an incredibly creative and original style.

A striking and painful plunge into the life and family of Andrea Dunbar. A fantastic piece of experimental documentary filmmaking.

The way this movie was shot and directing is yes very cool an a creative idea. I just wish I cared a little more about the story. I wasn't invested and a good documentary makes you invested In a story that you know nothing about

On a street called "the Arbor" in a British housing development named Bradford Estates, Yorkshire, a young girl named Andrea Dunbar grew up in the 1970's and 80's, amid a life of poverty, family drunkenness, promiscuity, racism and abuse. At the age of fifteen she wrote a play called "The Arbor" which truthfully depicted what she knew firsthand. It was successfully staged - a couple of more were written - all in the local vernacular and touching on the same topics; one of the plays (Rita, Sue and Bob Too) was made into a film, and then, a few years later, the young playwright was dead - probably of a brain aneurism. She left behind three children, from three different fathers, the oldest of whom, Lorraine, was half Pakistani, which in the Dunbar neighborhood was a scandal. Lorraine herself was a lovely girl, but her young life was a descending spiral of abuse, drug addiction, prostitution, and finally conviction for manslaughter for the death of her two year old son, Harris, who consumed a lethal dose of methadone one night and never woke up from a very deep sleep in the arms of his mother. Now documentary filmmaker Clio Barnard has taken this material and produced a film of great impact, employing a controversial and innovative technique. Using hours of recorded interviews with members of the families of Lorraine and her late mother, she has actors portraying them in various stages of their lives, and in some of the original locales, but rather than speaking, the actors lip-synch to the actual voices of the interviewees. The effect is haunting, because the voices provide an intimate connection to the people involved, yet the various scenes look formally staged and sometimes theatrical. The lower-class accents are in some cases indecipherable and the manner of speaking is a kind of devolved English - for instance articles are frequently dropped and there is some slang and common profanity. But subtitles are provided and the words are never too difficult to follow. Solemnly paced and at first seeming very disjointed, it doesn't take long to figure out the various family members and their relationships. We take their truthfulness for granted, even though, as happens in the case of multiple eyewitnesses, the facts don't always match up. With the accumulated detail of lives that seem destined for either chaos or disintegration, what results is very much like the pathos of Greek tragedy. The principal truth that we receive from "The Arbor" to me is this: that the sins of the father (or in this case, the mother) inevitably impact the lives of their children, and that sadness and hopelessness is pervasive in a milieu of poverty, lack of self-respect, free sex and frequent abortion, alcohol and drug abuse, and lack of consideration for human worth. Some might say it's insignificant that God, or religion, are never mentioned by any of the people involved, but for me, the absence of that spirituality is glaring. Indeed, in a society so terribly off-kilter, one has to wonder why?

Extraordinary. Landmark filmmaking. Review soon.

Stunning stuff. Life on a Bradford housing estate. Or something resembling life.

Remarkably sad, but also remarkably detached because of the director's "verbatim cinematic" approach.

a new way to watch a documentary, is simply amazing and mind blowing

. The Arbor's unusual but innovative approach to drama/documentary uncovers, like Dunbar's plays, the hardship and problems which lie at the heart of working-class Britain, (albeit in a completely different manner.) Exploring the life of a significant contributor to British working-class fiction The Arbor like Andrea Dunbar herself is too authentic and insightful to ignore.I loved everything about this sad film.