The Arbor

British playwright Andrea Dunbar was 19 when her play The Arbor was staged at London?s Royal Court Theatre in 1980. Its raw, incisive portrayal of the cycles of violence and addiction on a tough Bradford housing estate is drawn directly from her own experience, brutalized and pregnant at 15. Two plays and one film later, the young playwright died, at age 29. Clio Barnard?s film looks both at Dunbar?s life and the experiences of the young family she left behind and in particular her eldest daughter whose life followed a downward spiral remarkably similar to that of her mother?s.