MOTHERBOARD is a smartphone feature exploring motherhood, filmed over 20 years by BAFTA award-winning director Victoria Mapplebeck. Motherboard charts the joy, pain and comedy of raising a child alone.
Motherboard premiered at the London Film Festival in 2024 and won Victoria the WFTV Best Director award. There will be a screening and Q&A at the Ritzy in Brixton, hosted by Reclaim the Frame on Mother’s Day, March 30th 2025.
We are delighted that Motherboard’s director, Victoria Mapplebeck, has told us about how she made the film over 20 years as a single parent.
What do you do?
I wear many hats, director, editor, writer, producer, film critic, cinematographer, professor… and mum!
Who do you look after?
I’ve raised my son Jim alone since he was a baby, he’s 21 now.
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a parent/caregiver in the screen industries?
At 38, after many years of earning a living making documentaries for Film and TV, I found myself single, pregnant and broke. Unable to combine solo motherhood with freelance directing, I had to give up my career as a director pretty much overnight. Flexible working wasn’t on the table 20 years ago. Back then, you were expected to work long hours and weekends. Talking to younger women in the industry and the challenges they face combining motherhood and a career in the creative industries, it seems things are only marginally better than they were for me all those years ago.
I teach filmmaking and many of the women directors I’ve taught and mentored have felt like leaving the industry when faced with the herculean task of raising kids whilst navigating a career in Film and TV.
The biggest challenge I faced after over a decade out of the industry was getting back into it! My son Jim was ten before I felt able to chase production finance again. Without my old film and TV contacts, it was back to square one. I spent five years pitching an interactive documentary project, Text Me, at all the major film festivals and finance forums.
I finally got lucky with a promise of £70,000 from ARTE, but unable to get the match funding in time, the deal fell through. I was devastated. Burnt out and ready to give up, I decided to shoot my first smartphone short 160 Characters. It was liberating. I no longer needed to wait around for commissioners to get back to me. I could keep filming and keep telling my story
I spent the next decade filming the highs and lows of raising Jim alone and that archive became my feature doc Motherboard. My aim with Motherboard was to build a complex, personal and unsentimental portrait of a mother-son relationship from birth to adulthood, exploring the ways in which Jim and I navigate two generations of absent fathers and my breast cancer diagnosis when Jim was just 13.
I first began documenting our family life with my old DVCAM before shooting almost daily on five generations of smartphones, from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 15.
Even when our sales agent Autlook bought the international rights to Motherboard and offered us a pre-sale to start editing, we received numerous rejections or were just simply ghosted! We had a ‘no’ from BBC Storyville, ARTE, Chicken and Egg, Sundance, Netflix, Channel 4 and Doc Society, to name but a few. One of these email funding rejections is actually featured in Motherboard. I enjoyed turning the pain of yet another knockback into a storyline about the challenges of funding feature docs in an industry which right now only seems interested in stories featuring true crime and celebrities …
My amazing friend and Producer Debbie Manners who has been my ‘ride or die’ throughout, told me ‘ Don’t focus on the finish line, just keep running!’… and so that’s what I did.
I recorded hundreds of hours of footage, capturing each twist and turn in Jim’s life, from the thumbs-up he gave me during my first scan, to his first day at college. Finally, in 2023 OKRE came on board with full production funding. With their support, we were able to complete an 18-month edit and watch Motherboard have its UK premiere at London Film Festival last year. Months later I won the WFTV Best Director award with Motherboard. It’s been a long old journey but ultimately a good one!
What does a bad day look like?
Feeling unseen and unheard …
What about the best day?
A young director, pregnant with her first child, came up to me after a screening of Motherboard at One World Film Festival in Prague recently, she hugged me and told me that watching Motherboard was the first time she’s stopped feeling scared about becoming a mum and all the life-changing stuff she knew would come with it.
As a single-parent filmmaker, what’s the one thing that would make your working life better? And what industry change do you think would help single parent/caregiver filmmakers overall?
An understanding that single parent can mean solo parent. Many women are raising kids entirely on their own, whether that be by choice or circumstance. When they finish one shift, they go home, and a second shift begins …
The industry change that I think would help us all would be smartphones that automatically disable wifi at 6.00pm !
How helpful (or not) was the film to your motherhood journey, and vice versa – do you have any examples of either?
Motherhood is a hero’s journey, for most of us, it’s not a journey outwards to the most fantastic farest flung places, but a journey inwards, downwards to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know was there – Jessi Klein
I always loved this Jessi Klein quote. Motherboard begins with a personal story but it also tells a universal story. There are 3 million lone-parent families in the UK, and around 90% of those single parents are women.
Motherhood, as a story, is so infrequently told because the world tells us that what mothers do is unremarkable and unimportant. I wanted Motherboard to shine a light on the power and agency of the many women who are raising children alone. To create 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.
We were once turned down by a Documentary Producer who told us that Motherboard felt too “small” for him. He wanted “Big stories about true crime and space… Epic journeys”. I replied, “Raising my son alone… him meeting his dad for the first time and how we both survived the fall out of my breast cancer diagnosis… that’s been a pretty epic journey…”.
Why are stories which explore how women navigate the world, at all stages of life, often described as ‘small’? Motherboard is shot on small cameras in small spaces, but it explores big, relatable stories with a huge reach. I hope that Motherboard is proof that epic journeys can begin and end at home!
What is your favourite piece of advice from our Creating Inclusive Productions Resource – or is there something we need to add?
“Don’t apologise. Ask for what you need.” Shelly Love
Tell us about someone who is doing excellent work in the industry.
I’m loving the amount of super talented women Film and TV directors who are mining the pain, joy and comedy of their own lives to give us fantastic stories that feel innovative and authentic
Daisy May Hudson’s Lollipop, Cash Carroway’s Rain Dogs, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, Sophie Willan’s Alma’s Not Normal, Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, and Michelle de Swarte‘s Spent are just a few of the amazing projects that have inspired me and given me hope for our industry!
Victoria Mapplebeck is a BAFTA award winning artist and director, who has worked in film, VR and immersive audio. Her works explore autobiographical stories which ask universal questions about our relationship with technology, parenting, health and wellbeing.
