How is it possible that no international sales agent has yet to nab Blue Bag Life? The exceptional documentary won the Audience Award at the London Film Festival in late 2022 and just had its international premiere in Thessaloniki, but notwithstanding Modern Films acquiring the UK and Ireland rights, it appears no one has yet to board on sales. Surely that won’t last, as the film is a riveting, superbly edited cine-memoir of artist Lisa Selby’s relationship with her largely absent heroin-addicted dying mother, tied to her own struggles with addiction, her partner’s addiction and imprisonment, and her fears of how to break the cycle of maternal dysfunction. Maybe the stumbling block is that on paper all this sounds too heavy, too intimidating, yet Blue Bag Life is one of the very rare film-as-therapy documentaries whose honesty and insight is matched by visual artistry.
The opening credits list five people in the “A film by” category: Lisa Selby, Rebecca Lloyd Evans, Alex Fry, Josie Cole and Natasha Dack Ojumu, but in the closing credits only Lloyd Evans, Selby and Fry are named as directors. Press notes explain that the documentary, while all shot by Selby, was conceived as a collective production whose authors in a true sense include writer Cole and producer Dack Ojumu. One might suspect piecemeal results given so many cooks, but the film has an artistic and psychological integrity: it’s a deeply personal story with universal resonance, and it’s impossible not to be moved.
“Drugs and alcohol make life so much more pleasant” says a smiling Helen at the start; “I don’t want to stop.” And she never did, not from before she was pregnant with Lisa through to her death from breast cancer. Helen abandoned her daughter at 10 months, leaving her with the babysitter and then basically never came back, though in subsequent years she popped in and out of Lisa’s life on rare occasions. She’s undeniably fascinating, a charismatic woman from a middle-class background living in a basement apartment that looks more like a crack den in the Bronx than a council flat in London’s Greenwich. For Lisa she’s the mother who was never a mother, the absent, unknowable presence she longed for yet couldn’t pull into her life. “Mum. The word that doesn’t feel good. The word I’ve never called anyone.”
Lisa’s voiceover, frank, unembellished, with just the right cadence, is the thread that solidly ties everything together as the film shifts between different periods in her life, sometimes jumping back but then always moving towards the present. She explains that she writes, paints and records to help make sense of it all, collecting memories in concrete form because otherwise she can’t remember.
That footage of Helen blithely talking about her addictions is a lucky survivor of what she shot with her mother, because later on her hard drive crashed and she lost much of what was filmed. In some ways we want Helen to be a monster – Lisa says the first time she remembers holding her mother’s hand was when she was dead – but she’s too captivating, honest yet enigmatic, which makes Lisa’s yearning and struggles with addiction all the more understandable.
Lisa had stability: her father raised her in Essex with love but little money. As a teenager she acted out, smoking, drinking and doing drugs yet pulled herself together and got her degrees, always wanting to get closer to the woman who couldn’t handle the responsibilities of maternity. She met her partner Elliot Murawski in an AA meeting soon after she stopped drinking and he was getting off heroin, their experiences with addiction clearly a bond though one feels something deeper seeing them together. He’s there when she’s filming Helen, asking her a list of questions she’s carefully written out in a notebook, but in voiceover we learn that within a year of Elliot and Helen meeting, Lisa would lose them both.
In the case of Helen, that means her death; with Elliot, it was prison, convicted of dealing after he was back on smack. Blue Bag Life brings these elements of Lisa’s life together with a miraculous deftness, like a tapestry weaver who lays out the full design and then gradually builds up the different sections. The title derives from the flimsy blue plastic bags frequently used to store drugs, and while it doesn’t really work, there is something about the way the plastic is discarded and tattered that somehow finds parallels in Lisa’s sense of self. Perhaps it makes more sense as the name of the Instagram feed she started earlier, which has developed into a shared space for exploring lives touched by addiction and incarceration. In the end though the title here doesn’t really matter since the documentary’s power is felt with every statement and image.
Structuring this all must have been a major challenge, yet the filmmakers adroitly connect the elements, guiding the viewer through Lisa’s storm-tossed life with a psychological profundity that generously accords empathy even to Helen, whose demons Lisa will never fully know. Alex Fry and Rebecca Lloyd Evans edit various formats together and judiciously intersperse associative images that poetically reinforce mood and tone, nicely underscored by Dana Wachs’ unobtrusively apt music. Kudos to Doc Society and BBC Storyville for coming onboard with funding; now it’s time to get Blue Bag Life onto the international scene.
Director: Rebecca Lloyd Evans, Lisa Selby, Alex Fry
Written by: Josie Cole, Lisa Selby
With: Lisa Selby, Elliot Murawski
Producer: Natasha Dack Ojumu
Executive producers: Shanida Scotland, Lucie Kon, Nikki Parrott
Cinematography: Lisa Selby
Editing: Alex Fry, Rebecca Lloyd Evans
Music: Dana Wachs, Astrid Sonne
Production company: Tigerlily Productions (UK)
Venue: Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (Film Forward)
In English
92 minutes
