At the age of 38, Victoria Mapplebeck found herself single, pregnant and broke. Unable to combine motherhood with freelance directing, she was forced to abandon her career in TV, instead turning the camera on herself and her son, Jim.
Filmed over 20 years, Victoria has recorded hundreds of hours of footage, capturing eachtwist and turn in Jim’s life, from the thumbs-up he gave her during her first pregnancy scan tohis first day at college. MOTHERBOARD is a unique self-portrait charting the real-life comedy and roller coaster of solo parenting.
Victoria captures a life where both she and Jim survive her breast cancer diagnosis, two generations of absent fathers and Jim’s rollercoaster teen years with a gallows sense of humour and an irrepressible ability to turn lemons into lemonade. The film navigates the trials and traumas of unromanticized parenting, where chaos rules.
We’re privy to the monumental bust ups when tempers fray and doors slam, as well as the pair’s closeness and camaraderie as Jim turns into a fiercely opinionated andf unny young adult who suddenly towers over his mum. Honest, funny and infinitely relatable, MOTHERBOARD is the antidote to the unrealistic expectations we have about motherhood, and a film for anyone who wants to see family life in all its unfiltered glory.
It was a joy to interview Victoria on the blog.
1. Describe a typical day for you?
Woke at 8.00am, tried unsuccessfully not to check my work emails as soon as I reached for my phone. Made a coffee, put on Radio 3 because I can’t work to music with lyrics ! Wrote and submitted a 15 page funding application for my next film project. Totted up my credit card debt. Helped my son Jim do a self-tape for a cameo role in Greta Gerwig’s latest film. Picked my mum up from her physio appointment, took her home and made her a cup of tea and a sandwich. Did a Morrisons shop on the way back home. Persuaded Jim to finally clear out his wardrobe and trainer draw and put some of it on Vinted. Applied for an interest free balance transfer. Wrote a reference for one of my students. Prepped for a Motherboard film screening Q and A. Helped Jim shoot another self tape. Picked up an email telling me that my application for a new credit card had been ‘unsuccessful’. Finished an article on the motherhood penalty women face when raising kids and juggling a career in Film and TV. Ordered my HRT meds. Did the laundry. Burnt the meatballs …Watched the latest season of Squid Games with Jim. Turned the light out at 1,00am after an hour on Tik Tok, when I swore I’d just have a cheeky 10 mins!
What do you feel are your greatest achievements?
1. Raising my son Jim as a solo mum and seeing him transform into the kind, funny and talented young man he is today, despite some bumps in the road along the way.
2. Getting through 12 months of breast cancer treatment when Jim was only 14 and still managing to have a laugh with him on some of the toughest days.
3. Returning to filmmaking after my career tanked when I found myself 38, single pregnant and broke. Two decades later, my smartphone feature doc Motherboard will have its cinema release on August 15th . I’m 60 now and proof it’s never too late to stage a come back!
What’s in your bag?
Lipstick , phone, hand cream, business cards and a stack of pills and potions to relieve anything from a migraine to a hangover.
What are your ambitions in life?
1. I’d like to get better at asking for help. I’m from three generations of single mothers. Mothers who were strong, resilient and fiercely independent, but all of us martyrs. All of us met everyone else’s needs, except our own. When I was pregnant with Jim, I did all of my pregnancy scans and pre-natal appointments alone. Decades later, I would do six rounds of chemo, weeks of radiotherapy and endless time in hospital corridors awaiting results… all of it alone. I watched a Tik Tok recently with a therapist saying that ‘self isolating’ and not asking for help is a trauma response rather than a strength ….that was a bit of a wake up call !
2. Begin dating again but in the real world not via an app. Jim asked me on camera recently about what hopes I had for the future, I told him I wanted to, “Finish this film, lose weight, get my head in a better space and start dating again”. Jim’s pointed out I’ve been listing those exact goals for years, “You’ve been blocked for a decade mum!”
I can happily report that I’m through that block , after many years in the edit, I finished Motherboard, I got fit, lost 3 stones and finally, ‘got my head in a better place’. The only thing still on that list is the dating… so never say never and maybe that new journey will be my next film !
What do you wish you’d known at the start of your career you now know?
That you should always try and work with people that you can count as friends.
I’m lucky to count my brilliant executive producer, Debbie Manners as one of my best mates. Debbie’s also raised three amazing kids on her own and really understands what I’m trying to do with Motherboard, in creating a film which captures the highs and lows of parenting alone. Debbie always has my back, even when she disagrees with me, she gives great advice and is absolutely the person you want by your side in a crisis. I simply couldn’t have made Motherboard without her.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?
I’d love to be like Agnes Varda, who continued to make amazing feature films about her own life and the way she saw the world well into her 80s. I want my next feature documentary Home Truths, to capture the way in which I continue to navigate family, love, work and relationships into my 60s.
It struck me recently, that I rarely see films which explore the mental load women carry, women who are constantly spinning too many plates. I want to capture the day I describe in question one!
I’ll continue shooting the highs and lows of my home life on my smartphone but I also want to experiment with wearable cameras, to document the rollercoaster of what women do in an average day working from home. As a belated 60th birthday present, Jim is going to buy me the new Meta AI Ray-bans which have small cameras in the lens. I need a big archive for Home Truths, so my aim is to shoot and edit my life for the next five years and hopefully have another festival run and cinema release when I’m 65!
What advice would you give a budding filmmaker?
No budget/No excuse – You don’t need to wait around for one of the gatekeepers to green light your film, you can green light it yourself ! Smartphones are portable, unobtrusive and – even for the most cash–strapped filmmaker – accessible. The best camera you own is the one in your back pocket. I’ve been a self-shooting director for 30 years. The camera I shoot with has gone from needing a bag the size of a small suitcase to one that fits in my back pocket. Now you can shoot with your smartphone, the gap between your idea and your final film has never been so small.
– Learn to be resilient , In the screen industries, you’re way more likely to meet with a “no” than a “yes” so learn to roll with the punches and to keep going, despite the rejections you might meet along the way.
Was it nerve wracking sharing your experiences of motherhood publicly, what adversities did you need to overcome and what ultimately drove you?
Over the last two decades, I’ve 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 pregnancy scan to his first day at college. Motherboard charts the highs and lows of unromanticized parenting, where chaos rules, documenting how Jim and I navigated him meeting his dad for the first time at 13, closely followed by my breast cancer diagnosis and Jim’s party-hard late teens, when tempers frayed and doors slammed.
I think the toughest decision I made, was to keep filming family life during my breast cancer treatment. There’s a sequence in Motherboard in which I ask my oncologist if I can film the samples they took of my tumor. A week later I was looking at my own cancer cells down the barrel of a microscope. As I pulled focus, I realised that these were the cells that could potentially kill me one day. When cancer is often so invisible, to be able to actually see it meant a lot to me.
I remember reading about how foetal cells can stay in a women’s body for the rest of her life. For a woman who’s had a pregnancy come to full term or a pregnancy that has ended by choice or by circumstance, potentially there’s a trace of that foetus within them for as long as they live.
Staring at my cancer cells through the microscope that day, I realised that some of the shapes I was looking at, might be Jim’s cells. I took comfort in knowing that a bit of Jim would stay with me on a cellular level….forever, until I died.
Motherboard doesn’t shy away from the pain Jim and I have experienced along the way but I wanted to explore those difficult times in a way that was raw and honest. I wanted to shift perceptions on how families cope when the going gets tough, opening up new conversations about the ways in which parents and young people can ‘rescript’ rather than ‘relive’ trauma and loss. I’m hoping that Motherboard is proof that you can turn your pain and loss into your power and your medicine
What advice would you give a first time mother?
- Motherhood is a hero’s journey
In I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood (2022), author and comic Jessi Klein writes that: “Motherhood as a story, is so infrequently told, because the world tells us that what mothers do is unremarkable and unimportant.” She goes on to explore the structure of the hero’s epic journey in Hollywood blockbusters, in which the (usually male) hero embarks on a quest and returns home transformed.
Klein turns this formula on its head. “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” .
- Take time for yourself –This is hard to do but important if you’re going to stay sane !
When I was making Motherboard one of my biggest influences was a TV series called Better Things, written by and starring Pamela Adlon, based on her own experiences of being a single mum to her three teenage daughters in LA. There’s a great scene in the final series where Adlon’s character, Sam, is being examined by her doctor who asks her if she’s stressed out because she has, “too many errands to run”.
She replies: “No, no. Errands are, like, groceries and going to the post office, it’s the real mum stuff … Soccer club sign-ups and dance classes and tutors and tuition payments and parent-teacher conferences and schools and camps that I have to get them into, mean girl issues with my youngest at school and birth control with my oldest and cruelty from my middle daughter. And then there’s my own mom, who is driving me nuts … And I am definitely going through menopause. So, yeah, Dr. Babu, it’s, like – it’s a lot.”
It is a lot .. so unlike me, ask for help and enjoy it because you’ll miss it when they leave home!
Finally, happiness is…
After a long day editing in the summer, taking a picnic dinner up to my local park. There’s a paddling pool that Jim and I used to spend hours in when he was growing up. I like to sit on a bench watching the kids play and the sun set, drinking a can of gin and tonic with ice and lemon.
Motherboard website
Victoria’s personal website
https://victoriamapplebeck.com
MOTHERBOARD is in cinemas 15th August tullstories.co.uk.
Pre-order my debut children’s book
Greek Myths, Folktales & Legends for 9-12 year olds
Published by Scholastic. Available on Amazon
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