The Arbor: Not Your Average Documentary

"Unoriginal". The be-all end-all pejorative when criticizing a movie. Usually movie critics and jilted viewers reserve this bile for Hollywood re-runs and genre re-hashes. But perhaps the most "unoriginal" genre of all usually escapes unscathed - documentary.


For every documentary film that does something "original" with the genre, there are hundreds that just recycle the same interview, archive, and re-enactment techniques ad infinitum. Don't be fooled though, there's more than one way to handle non-fiction.

The Arbor is not one of these cookie-cutter docs. Directed by Clio Barnard, this film has style and guile to spare in its approaches to non-fiction representation. The film tells the story of the late English playwright Andrea Dunbar and the grave reverberations of her work and life in her children.






The film starts with this card: “This is a true story filmed with actors lip-syncing to the voices of the people whose story it tells."

And this technique of having actors sync-act to pre-recorded interviews isn't the only representation strategy at play in The Arbor. Alongside that and a variety of other techniques, strewn throughout the film are a different set of actors performing scenes from Andrea Dunbar's most famous play - also titled "The Arbor" - in the neighborhood her life and work were set in, which you guessed it, is the Arbor (in Bradford, England). And maybe the coolest part of all this, as this play within the movie unfolds, local people and members of Andrea's family look on as the real-life audience.

Yes, as The Arbor reminds us, we can expect more from documentaries. Non-fiction films can be held up to aesthetic standards just as fiction films are. Substance still leads, but style can follow.