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Who are we?

Sunderland Film Club is a not-for-profit, volunteer-run community cinema screening the most inventive and expressive work in contemporary documentary cinema.

With monthly screenings, talks and workshops at the historic city centre pub, The Peacock, the club will provide an inclusive space for people of all different backgrounds to enjoy, learn and feel inspired.

Funded and supported by Cinema for All and the British Film Institute (BFI).

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What are we screening?

This month we're screening one of the most formally inventive, emotionally devastating films of the past 20 years - The Arbor by Clio Barnard.

The film tells the story of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar and her daughter Lorraine. Described as "a genius straight from the slums with black teeth and a brilliant smile", Dunbar shot to fame in 1980 when her play The Arbor premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre. An autobiographical account of poverty, violence and alcoholism on the infamous Buttershaw estate, the play acted as an expose of the reality of life in Thatcherite Britain. Despite immense talent, her life was marred by the same problems she wrote about and tragically died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 29.

Fascinated by Dunbar's story, Barnard spent two years recording over 90 hours of audio interviews with family, friends and residents of Buttershaw to see what had changed on the estate two decades since her death. Actors then lip-synched the words of real life interviewees, creating a disorientating effect which reveals the artifice of documentary filmmaking and exposes the gap between representation and reality. What results is a mix of verbatim theatre, site-specific performance and archive footage to create a portrait of a family and a community.