How 6 generations of iPhone captured 20 years of motherhood in ‘Motherboard’

One of the BFI London Film Festival’s (LFF) most delightful discoveries this year has been Motherboard — a domestic epic spanning 20 years, during which director Victoria Mapplebeck documented her life with her son Jim.

The filmmaker has been capturing footage from the moment she found out she was pregnant, through the turbulent start of Jim’s teenage years — marked by an attempt to reconnect with his father, and by his mother’s cancer diagnosis — all the way to his twentieth birthday. This intimate documentary feels like the real-life version of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, the director’s Oscar-winning coming-of-age film which revisited the same cast over 12 years — unsurprisingly, Boyhood was a reference for Motherboard.

Through the years, Mapplebeck filmed using six generations of iPhone — from 2014’s iPhone 6 to 2023’s iPhone 15. But more than just a filming tool, in an almost tactile way, technology’s evolution in the past two decades is also incorporated in the story. The first time Jim was photographed was via a medical ultrasound, which we see at the very start of the film. Later, medical tech’s imaging advancements would return during Mapplebeck’s cancer treatment when, in a particularly powerful scene, she confronts her fears by looking at microscopic footage of her own cancer cells. In a voiceover, she meditates over the little pink cells’ undeniable beauty, and invites the audience to share this startlingly aesthetic experience. Technology in Motherboard is, it seems, Mapplebeck’s way to look at, connect, and make sense of the world — the things in it that are loved and those which are feared.

Smartphones also function as memory holders, and Mapplebeck makes full use of this living archive; from text messages and voice notes, to videos posted to Jim’s Snapchat and Instagram accounts, the history of the family’s lives is preserved on digital devices. 

This intersection of film and the digital world has been present in Mapplebeck’s work way before her feature film. In 2014, she wrote and directed TEXT ME — an interactive online platform in which users are encouraged to collect, curate, and share the archives of their digital past. In 2019, she documented her diagnosis with breast cancer and subsequent treatment in a VR interactive project called The Waiting Room. In the interim, two short films, which created the base for Motherboard, explored different aspects of single motherhood: in 160 Characters, Mapplebeck revisits the history of her relationship with Jim’s absent father through old messages stored on her Nokia phone, while Missed Call (2017) explores her and Jim’s decision to reconnect with him.

During the LFF, Mashable talked to Mapplebeck about the making of Motherboard, the role of technology in her work, and rethinking the “epic journey” trope.

Teodosia Dobriyanova: In your work, you often explore the possibilities of technology and new media. What is it about these tools that speaks to your practice?

Victoria Mapplebeck: I was probably very interested and inspired by Sean Baker’s Tangerine — that was the first feature drama that was made, I think, on the iPhone 6. At that time, I’d started this whole project by writing, because you can write for no money, and that’s a great thing when you’re a filmmaker that’s very much out of that whole commissioning loop. So I’d started writing a short story with all of the Nokia texts that I had unwittingly archived between myself and Jim’s dad. I thought that it could be really interesting to bring to life a phone story with a phone. That was in 2015. 

I was probably very interested and inspired by Sean Baker’s ‘Tangerine’ — that was the first feature drama that was made, I think, on the iPhone 6.

I did my first smartphone short for Film London, and it only cost £2,000. It was just Film London’s regional funding, and shooting on a smartphone meant that I could make the film for that amount. I found that really liberating. It was difficult coming out of a career in film and TV for so long, which I had to do when I had Jim, and then coming back in initially, I was trying to go, I suppose, the route I’d originally done in the ’90s and 2000s where you’re trying to get reasonably large TV budgets, and you’re at all of the pitching forums at the documentary festivals. I’d done about three or four years of that, and finally got €70,000 from Arte, but then I couldn’t get the match funding that I needed to get in the short window, and I lost it all. 

Then the smartphone short that I’d made for Film London got a Vimeo Staff Pick, and it started to have this life online. It was just a revelation for me. I just thought, sod the gatekeepers. I’m not waiting around for, often, male commissioners to get a very female-skewed story, and also fund a woman film director who’s been out of the industry for a long time. I just thought, sod it, I’m done. 

TD: Do you think shooting on a phone also changed something about the way you filmed your son Jim?

VM: There’s an intimacy that I think Jim really responds to, that he would not have liked if I had got out a much bigger kit and complicated sound setups. And so it worked very well for the spontaneity of filming Jim. Of course, he’s used to phones — he’s grown up with phone technology. And the smartphones were fantastic for access. It meant that I could embrace Werner Herzog’s advice to documentary filmmakers, which is that you should ask for forgiveness, not for permission. You can waste so many months and years of your life trying to get permissions that you don’t necessarily get after months and months of back and forth. 

When I was going through the cancer treatment, I didn’t ever try to contact the comms department at Guy’s or King’s [hospitals]. I just would turn up with my smartphone and I’d say, “I’m charting my whole experience of going through cancer. Would you mind if I’m shooting with the phone?” And not once did somebody say no — it was completely fine. If anything, quite often, I couldn’t get the shot because I was going in a CT scanner, and nurses and radiographers would actually set the shot up for me. So I’m quite evangelical about smartphones. To me, they have many, many more liberating and transformative affordances than they have limitations. I would never go back to the kind of kit that needed the size of a small suitcase that I had in the ’90s and 2000s.

TD: You’ve been keeping this incredible archive since before Jim was born, and you have made a couple of shorts with it before Motherboard. At what point did you think about developing a feature film?

VM: I think the short films evolved on their own. When Jim was about 13, he decided that he wanted to meet with his dad, and I asked him if he was OK with documenting that process as a film. In a way, that film was not just about him contacting his dad, but the whole process of how difficult that was. You know, how do you contact a man that you’ve not spoken to for 11 years? Do you cold call him or do you text him, which is, in the end, what I did. But what do you put in that text? The fears that I had were that Jim was still so young, and that potentially it was going to meet with more rejection, because maybe his dad would have refused to see him. 

But then the difficult thing that happened at the same time, when I was in the edit for Missed Call, was that I got a breast cancer diagnosis out of the blue. I didn’t have any symptoms, so it was just picked up with a mammogram. I have an amazing friend and executive producer, Debbie Manners, who’d worked with me on Missed Call, and I think we both felt that that journey was huge in itself, and that actually we had a feature film. 

A still from “Motherboard” showing Victoria Mapplebeck’s POV as she enters a CT scan.
Credit: Victoria Mapplebeck

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was always a huge influence, so I’d always had it in my head. I very much wanted to capture the joy of raising Jim, because I wanted to create an antidote, I think, to a lot of the cliches and, quite frankly, very sexist baggage we have about single moms. You know, Boris Johnson’s idea that we’re all tragic figures who are a drain on the state. But I think, in a way, if you’re going to look at parenting, you need to look at it in a very three-dimensional way. So I was prepared to show the difficult moments of parenting, which obviously come when you’re a lone parent and you’re going through cancer treatment and the stresses of that.

TD: Something I noticed is that you were very gentle in approaching difficult conversations with Jim. It looked like you would have a lot of the different conversations off-screen, and then either elaborate or repeat them for the camera. Was it hard to be both a mother and a director at the same time?

VM: I’m glad that you’ve observed that. Some of the conversations that are difficult, they’re not live, so I don’t doorstep Jim. You know that difficult conversation where I’ve had the call with his dad, where he said he might think about meeting Jim, but he wants to talk it through with his wife and his other son — I did not film then. It was two days later, when I filmed Jim, and sort of summarized what’s happening. I don’t film in that live way. We’ve already had that conversation, and then, in a way, we do a different one for the camera.

“It’s difficult, because I’m both mum and director, and in some respects, there’s a power to being the parent of your main subject.”

He always had the power of veto. Myself and my editor, particularly when I was working with a woman editor [Lisa Forrest] on the shorts, who was very fond of Jim, we would sit down and show him anything difficult, and we wouldn’t use things if he wasn’t happy with it. He always had a really good sense of what material we were working with, and I think he knew we had that power. It’s difficult, because I’m both mum and director, and in some respects, there’s a power to being the parent of your main subject, because obviously you really give a damn about them, and you really care about what’s the long tail of this experience, and what will the legacy of this film be for Jim, both in the present and the future. 

We were unfunded for a long, long, long time, and then we finally got money from Okre, who were linked to the Wellcome Trust. I think they could perceive that there was a real ethical challenge in the film, where it’s a mum making a film, and Jim’s shot in very vulnerable situations. We did a three-month development period with them, where we had a round table event with commissioners and producers, and psychotherapists and teenage mental health consultants, putting me in every scenario, like, what effect could the film have on a future relationship with Jim’s dad? Is he saying yes because he knows how happy filming makes me, is he saying yes just to please me? Does he still feel he’s got a sense of agency to say no? And so that was really useful. 

Then the other thing we did is, when I was going through cancer at the very beginning, and Jim and I were really just shell shocked by the whole thing, I would just do a Zoom audio recording, and it would go on for about 50 minutes. At that time, I couldn’t get any family therapy, there was nothing on the NHS, and weirdly, that became a sort of DIY family therapy, because we’d have these audio conversations where Jim didn’t feel self-conscious because I wasn’t even filming him. And he’d often let me know some quite troubling things. We didn’t use it at the end, but there was a terrible bit where he was sort of saying, “If anything happened to you, I’d off myself.” And although that’s really, really difficult to hear as a parent, at least I got to talk it through with him. 

TD: Motherboard belongs to a kind of subgenre of domestic cinema, centered around family history. And these stories seem to predominantly be told by women. Why do you think this is the case? 

VM: In our proposal, there was a Jessie Klein quote, who is a writer and a comedian in the States. She wrote this really great piece, it was a podcast as well, which was a response to Joseph Campbell’s idea of the hero’s journey. And she was saying that there’s still a case where every fucking hero’s journey you can see in virtually every theater, book, and film, is a male journey with a male protagonist, and they’re going on a search and a quest to shores far, far away, and all of their hurdles are external. She said she thinks motherhood is a hero’s journey, but it’s not a journey to far-flung places. It’s a journey inwards and downwards to the toughest parts of yourself that you didn’t even know existed. 

“Why do we call women’s journeys and experiences small?”

And so that was in my proposal for a long time, and then we had a meeting. Actually, just after I’d won the BAFTA [for Missed Call] , myself and producer Debbie Manners, got a meeting with…I probably shouldn’t say the name of the streaming platform. I’ll let you guess. He just said, straight away, “Yeah, I’ve watched your film, it’s really little. It’s sort of very personal, isn’t it?” And he said, “But you know, my platform is after much bigger stories about true crime and space and epic journeys,” with great emphasis. I just thought, I’ve got nothing to lose here, he’s going to say no. And I said, “Well, do you know what, raising my son as a solo mother, and then when my son hits 13, he meets his father for the first time, which is closely followed by his mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, and then later Covid and all of the challenges that that had for a young person, that’s put us on a pretty epic journey.” And he just said, “Oh, yeah, thanks for sharing that,” and ended the call. It led me to thinking, you know, like, why? 

Why do we call women’s journeys and experiences small? I know Michaela Coel has written really similar things when she was writing I May Destroy You, but again, lots of commissioners and early funders would say that it was small, and therefore not taken seriously. I think generally, motherhood is not given the emphasis it deserves. I mean, it’s a massive existential life quest. There was a Guardian piece that picked up on the fact there’s quite a lot of films in the London Film Festival at the moment that are touching on motherhood, such as Steve McQueen’s Blitz, and there’s Nightbitch, and The Wild Robot, which is a kid’s film.

TD: And also April, did you see it?

VM: No, is it good? 

TD: Yes, though it offers a different perspective on motherhood.

VM:  I’m in the mood for seeing more films before the festival finishes, so I’m gonna try and see that one. 

Motherboard is screening on Oct. 19 at Curzon Soho as part of the BFI London Film Festival. International release details TBC.

On Oct. 20, Victoria Mapplebeck will also be part of two LFF talks, Telling Your Story, Your Way, and Changing Hearts and Minds: The Powerful Role of Film in Opening Minds and Altering Perspectives Hosted by Female Film Club.

This interview has mentioned suicide. If you’re feeling suicidal or experiencing a mental health crisis, please talk to somebody. You can reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988; the Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860; or the Trevor Project at 866-488-7386. Text “START” to Crisis Text Line at 741-741. Contact the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m. ET, or email [email protected]. If you don’t like the phone, consider using the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline Chat at crisischat.org. Here is a list of international resources.