This Just In

Why are so many British fea­ture debuts about child­hood trauma?

30 Oct 2023

Words by Billie Walker

Diverse group of individuals in a circular frame, set against a colourful, abstract background with splashes of blue, orange and white.
Diverse group of individuals in a circular frame, set against a colourful, abstract background with splashes of blue, orange and white.
An excel­lent crop of debut films in the past cou­ple of years all explore painful child­hoods. What does this say about the inter­ests of the British film industry?

The con­cept of trau­ma has us in a cul­tur­al head­lock. Nowa­days you can’t watch a real­i­ty com­pe­ti­tion with­out being con­front­ed by someone’s heart­break­ing back­sto­ry, as though their weepy con­fes­sion­al some­how ele­vates them as a wor­thy com­peti­tor despite hav­ing noth­ing to do with their skill in drag, glass­blow­ing or pot­tery. Much like the Tik­Tok­ers whose fol­low­ings soar when they share shock­ing anec­dotes while detached­ly apply­ing their skin­care rou­tine, cin­e­ma is trans­fixed by cap­i­tal­is­ing on pain, whether in the famil­iar ter­ri­to­ry of hor­ror or clos­er to home.

In the last year in British cin­e­ma alone, we’ve had Char­lotte Wells’ After­sun, Char­lotte Regan’s Scrap­per and Luna Carmoon’s Hoard. All con­tain pow­er­ful debut per­for­mances by Frankie Corio, Lola Camp­bell and Saura Light­foot Leon and Lily-Beau Leon, and all con­cern them­selves with the nuances of grief from the per­spec­tive of young women. Anoth­er British fea­ture debut that tack­les hard-hit­ting sub­ject mat­ter is Mol­ly Man­ning Walker’s How to Have Sex, which fol­lows 16-year-old Tara’s (Mia Mcken­na-Bruce) shock­ing expe­ri­ence of sex­u­al vio­lence while on hol­i­day with her friends.

Much as no two instances of suf­fer­ing are the same, these films are all very dif­fer­ent, and all four film­mak­ers have right­ful­ly received praise for their impres­sive debuts. But it does seem like a pat­tern is form­ing too fast to be catch­ing a post-After­sun wave of suc­cess. While it’s under­stand­able that small per­son­al sto­ries with few­er char­ac­ters and loca­tions are eas­i­er to finance than grand epics or genre pieces, the British film indus­try nev­er­the­less seems fas­ci­nat­ed by new voic­es will­ing to bare their souls in the name of mak­ing a movie.

A young man and woman resting together on a patterned sofa, the woman's head on the man's shoulder.

I find myself cau­tious of this trend because I have also had to sell my trau­ma. There is an unspo­ken expec­ta­tion for many writ­ers (par­tic­u­lar­ly young women and peo­ple from oth­er mar­gin­alised com­mu­ni­ties) to cut their teeth this way. My first pieces – and still the ones that get the most atten­tion – are the sexy, shock­ing and painful ones, where I’ve had to reach inside and show the edi­tor (and even­tu­al­ly the audi­ence) all the dark sticky stuff.

Writ­ing about your trau­ma, with the help of a sen­si­tive edi­tor, can be eye-open­ing. Shin­ing light on the dark­er moments that iso­lat­ed you means find­ing oth­ers who have been there too. You can be met with read­ers who share your pain, who thank you for artic­u­lat­ing some­thing they didn’t have the words for. But out­lets expect­ing divul­gence and an indus­try built on reveal­ing per­son­al essays are part of the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of trau­ma. Some cre­atives have to bran­dish their mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion and iden­ti­ty through­out their career to demon­strate to stu­dios and financiers their right to tell a sto­ry. In con­trast, oth­ers jump straight into gang­ster flicks, spy movies or alien inva­sions seem­ing­ly with­out hav­ing to bare their soul in the process.

Anoth­er female direc­to­r­i­al debut that explores a woman’s trau­mat­ic child­hood mem­o­ry, is Cen­sor, Pra­no Bailey-Bond’s 2021 debut fea­ture, which under­stands the way our painful his­to­ry can be pack­aged, com­mod­i­fied and weaponised against us. Cen­sor explores exploita­tion and trau­ma in the era of the video nasty. While work­ing for the British Board of Film Clas­si­fi­ca­tion, Enid (Niamh Algar) views a video of her long-lost sis­ter, trig­ger­ing trag­ic child­hood mem­o­ries. Cheap gore flicks of the 80s are the hor­rors she scans through at work, but the Thatcherite Britain of Cen­sor car­ries its own hor­rors, includ­ing the minor strikes, police bru­tal­i­ty and a coun­try in aus­ter­i­ty. As Pra­no Bai­ley-Bond told Vul­ture, Cen­sor address­es the rea­sons why peo­ple do ter­ri­ble things: it can come from how we’ve been treat­ed in life and how we feel in our heads.” Cen­sor demon­strates that the moral pan­ic of this exploita­tion genre was mis­placed, hor­ror being an easy scape­goat for soci­etal ills. But while trau­ma and hor­ror are nat­ur­al part­ners, what about the wider trend of female film­mak­er debuts that focus on sim­i­lar subjects?

Apart from the dead rel­a­tives and grief these films have in com­mon, there’s more con­nec­tive tis­sue. Each par­ent strug­gles to sup­port their child – in After­sun, Calum’s (Paul Mescal) will­ing­ness to pur­chase an expen­sive rug sig­nals his men­tal decline, while oth­er errat­ic instances dur­ing their fam­i­ly hol­i­day read as more warn­ing signs he’s not okay. Mean­while, oth­er chil­dren are close to falling through the cracks of fail­ing child­care sys­tems. It takes an avalanche of clut­ter to remove young Maria from an unsta­ble home in Hoard, while Georgie in Scrap­per fakes a parental pres­ence to bare­ly inter­est­ed social ser­vices to avoid being tak­en into care. These are not just tales of trau­ma, but pow­er­ful explo­rations of British class struc­ture and fail­ings as seen through the eyes of those not yet equipped to under­stand the injustice.

Two young people, a boy and a girl, in deep conversation, facing each other with focused expressions.

Mol­ly Man­ning Walker’s How To Have Sex has already been likened to After­sun, in that both films fol­low young girls on hol­i­days that have a trag­ic under­cur­rent. But both films also artic­u­late ways in which soci­ety fails men. Char­lotte Wells’ father fig­ure, Calum, silent­ly strug­gles with his depres­sion, drink­ing and silent­ly sob­bing while his daugh­ter sleeps, unable to reach out for help. Mol­ly Man­ning Walk­er recog­nis­es that while men are the per­pe­tra­tors and com­plic­it bystanders of sex­u­al vio­lence, it’s a lay­ered issue that requires edu­ca­tion of both young men and women to rec­ti­fy. In an inter­view with the Guardian, Walk­er stat­ed: It’s the way that soci­ety has brought them up. Be a strong man. You’ve got to take the lead, and you’ve got to know what you’re doing.’” Alarm­ing instances of male sui­cide and gen­dered vio­lence are not sep­a­rate issues – they are two heads of the same beast. How to Have Sex seeks to start a con­ver­sa­tion about sex­u­al con­sent, and chal­lenge per­cep­tions about how young men and women are socialised.

Of course there’s also a degree of auton­o­my here; all these debut film­mak­ers have fought to tell their own sto­ries, on their own terms. We have a new gen­er­a­tion of direc­tors who have the lan­guage to explore per­son­al issues in bold and brave new ways. Luna Car­moon explained to AnOth­er the com­plex cathar­tic process she went through writ­ing Hoard: I went from ven­om and grief and sad­ness to anoth­er kind of sad­ness, it was like the stages of grief, and then when I’d [fin­ished] the script it was just love, it healed me.” None of these direc­tors have been coerced into mak­ing these works that express the nuance of their indi­vid­ual his­to­ry. Nev­er­the­less, many young female film­mak­ers whose debuts cen­tre on tragedy, whether per­son­al or not, invite us to reflect on our own. Per­haps it’s a mat­ter of know­ing what audi­ences con­nect to.

From the coun­cil house cheap hol­i­day resort sets to retro nee­dle drops, all of these debuts are quin­tes­sen­tial of a cer­tain British child­hood, and there’s def­i­nite­ly a nos­tal­gic ele­ment to each. For those of us who grew up in the 90s and noughties we can see some­thing of our­selves reflect­ed in the grainy Mini DV cam­era footage of After­sun, the lurid Malia nightlife of How To Have Sex, or Hoard’s sim­ple but sat­is­fy­ing chip­py tea. The audience’s pain may not match those on screen, but the speci­fici­ty with which these film­mak­ers show their own pain invites us to trawl through our own mem­o­ries. Film at its core hopes to evoke empa­thy from its audi­ence, but at what point are we sim­ply pro­ject­ing our own issues onto the can­vas­es that look sim­i­lar to our child­hood? At what point are we judg­ing films by the per­son­al expe­ri­ences we project on them more than their mer­it? Worse still, it seems we are miss­ing the greater issue of Britain’s under­served social and med­ical ser­vices because we can’t see past our tears?

The trau­ma trend has in some ways uni­ver­salised expe­ri­ences that are felt extreme­ly dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on finan­cial sta­tus and sup­port sys­tems. Yes, we all expe­ri­ence trau­ma’ in some fash­ion, but the cop­ing mech­a­nisms we can utilise to over­come it depend large­ly on our posi­tion in soci­ety. The empha­sis on the indi­vid­ual when it comes to trau­ma can mean we fail to recog­nise that men­tal ill­ness is a soci­etal issue as well as a per­son­al one – and it’s exac­er­bat­ed by a state that fails its cit­i­zens. By focus­ing on the pain rather than its alle­vi­a­tion, per­haps we aren’t focus­ing enough on hold­ing the gov­ern­ment account­able, when there has nev­er been more need for a work­ing wel­fare and health­care system.

We take our reac­tionary respons­es as proof of a film’s poignan­cy, but are our tears a sign of the film’s suc­cess, or a symp­tom of our own desire for emo­tion­al con­nec­tion? The per­son­al is polit­i­cal, but when will we stop being expect­ed to bare our souls in order to be grant­ed entry into the dis­cus­sion, and can the depic­tion of trau­ma change real-world cir­cum­stances for the bet­ter? My hope is that these new tal­ents don’t get pigeon­holed into shar­ing their trau­ma, con­stant­ly called upon to retrieve new gems from their past, but instead can be backed with fund­ing for wild­ly adven­tur­ous projects that tell epic sto­ries as well as per­son­al ones. Sim­i­lar­ly, aspir­ing film­mak­ers (and writ­ers!) shouldn’t have to share their dark­est secrets in order to prove their worth. But if some­one feels empow­ered by telling their sto­ry, let’s hope doing so might inspire audi­ences to ask for wider change.

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