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Pip

Pip

Pip is a short live action film that explores the space between motherhood and motherlessness, through the analogy of an orange tree. A pregnant woman reminisces on her childhood, and wonders how she will bring up her own children without her late mother’s guidance.

Pip began as a writing prompt, given to me by writing tutor Jane Hankin. She asked me to write about the inside of an orange.

At first, I only had one phrase; "We laid mama to rest under the orange tree." It was a play on words, swapping marmalade for mama laid, and it hinted at motherhood, death, and a family tree in a literal and metaphorical sense.

I read Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. I ate my way through clementines, Nardicots, Valencias. I made monoprints using orange peel. I went to Seville on a uni trip, and finally felt the story come alive. I ate sweet oranges, watched them ripen in a hazy market square, heard the whisper of waxen leaves, rich and dark green. Phrases and descriptions littered my sketchbooks, thumbnail sketches of fruits, skies, colours. My skin became sunkissed, smattered with freckles, each one a record of time spent researching, recording, drawing, living. 

When I got home, I wrote the screenplay. I created a quiet moment in which a daughter buries her mother under an orange tree.

I planned and storyboarded the film extensively and worked with filmmaker Will Webb to realise the film in the final stages.

2017

Barbican Centre – Are You Sitting Comfortably?

Kingston School of Art – IABA Film Festival

2018

London Short Film Festival – Lost In Translation