Lollipop

Edinburgh International Film Festival

Four stars

Part howl of rage, part redemption song, Daisy-May Hudson’s extraordinary feature debut is a vibrant and moving broadside against a sluggish and under-resourced social care and Family Court system, and follows on from her 2015 documentary about homelessness, Half Way. The homeless family in that film was her own, kicked out of the rented accommodation they had lived in for 13 years. Hudson filmed her mother and 13-year-old sister over the course of a year as they adjusted to life in a hostel, and won a BAFTA in 2016 for her efforts.

In Lollipop she dramatises aspects of that personal story but widens the focus to pull in universal themes and experiences common to anyone who has found themselves dealing with the state as a result of debt, addiction or pure bad luck.

Here the homeless person is single mother Molly Brown (a quite brilliant Posy Sterling). As the film opens she is being released from prison after serving a sentence for an unspecified crime, though one minor enough to have put her away for months rather than years. She assumes she can pick up life with her two young children, Ava (Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoads) and Leo (Luke Howitt), who were left with her semi-alcoholic mother Sylvie (TerriAnn Cousins).

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Wrong. Sylvie has handed them over to ‘the social’ so custody is now in the hands of the state and prising its mitts off her kids is not going to be easy. Without an address, Molly can’t get her children. Without a job, she can’t get an address. But without an address, she can’t get a job. And so it goes. It doesn’t help when, in a risky and ill-judged move driven by desperation, she takes matters into her own hands. Luckily, old friend Amina (Idil Ahmed) is around to try to anchor her.

Hudson’s is not a film about faceless officialdom, however. It’s more nuanced than that. Though there is an air of the Kafkaesque to the situations Molly finds herself in, the case workers and foster carers she encounters are not unfeeling (“I’m just doing my job,” one says resignedly). This is a film entirely about women – there are literally not men – but it’s about the women on both sides of the desk, the ones who need help and the ones whose job it is to try to give it in a system and a country so denuded of resources and morale.

Ultimately it’s a film about the strength all of those women show – the strength to endure, to fight for each other and what matters to them, to find new ways of building families and new meaning even in the word itself.

From Ken Loach to Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard, British film-makers have always done this sort of realism well. Daisy-May Hudson, new kid on the block, shows in Lollipop that she can does it better than most.