‘Blue Bag Life’: London Review

Dirs: Lisa Selby, Rebecca Lloyd-Evans, Alex Fry. UK. 2022. 90mins

A personal story of loss and longing evolves into a wider contemplation of love and acceptance in documentary Blue Bag Life. Artist, lecturer and filmmaker Lisa Selby turns the camera on herself and her attempts to understand her relationship with both her late mother and incarcerated partner — both heroin addicts — which in turn lead to an exploration of her own feelings about becoming a mother. Sensitively constructed from a a lifetime of material assembled by Selby and a collective of filmmakers including director Rebecca Lloyd-Evans and director/editor Alex Fry, it’s raw, honest and immersive filmmaking.

A work of candour and compassion

The film is the next step in a project which started life as a no-holds-barred Instagram account through which Selby documented her mother’s struggles with addiction, something she’d kept secret for most of her childhood. Having premiered in London, where it won the Audience Award, Blue Bag Life is destined for BBC Storyville (which backed the film along with the BFI Doc Society Fund). Selby and her partner Elliot Murawski a former heroin addict who features in both her Insta-feed and film, now work in addiction support, delivering a TEDx talk in 2020, and this film should become an important tool in their activism. 

Despite the fact that Selby’s mother, Helen, abandoned her daughter as an infant to pursue a life of drugs and alcohol, the filmmaker admits to putting her absent parent on a pedestal. Selby remained determined to know her mother, regularly attempting to reach out to her and documenting some of their conversations. That only a few of these video fragments now survive adds a bittersweet poignancy to their interactions. 

In these on-camera conversations with a clearly inebriated Helen, Selby retains her composure as she asks questions that run the gamut from the mundane — “can you sing?” — to the devastating — “why have you kept your distance?”. These questions remained unanswered when Helen died of cancer in 2017.  Then, within a few short months, Selby’s beloved partner, Elliot, is imprisoned for drug dealing. Left alone once again, Selby documented her grief, anger and continuing search for understanding.

Blue Bag Life — so named after the pieces of blue plastic drugs wrappings Selby would find in her home — develops in a non-linear way, a rough patchwork of Selby’s own hand-held video, photographs and art making for a deliberately disorienting experience. While occasional, traditionally-framed scenes (a snowy winter field, a bee buzzing on a flower) give a fleeting sense of peace, most of the film leans into the chaos. The camera is an unflinching witness to Helen’s collapsed veins, Elliot’s mental health breakdown and Selby’s slide back into her own alcohol dependency. Elsewhere, photographs of the dirty clutter of Helen’s flat are presented like carefully composed works of art, which will be familiar to Selby’s Instagram followers.

Selby’s own narration flows over these images and is an admirably frank stream of consciousness which occasionally drifts into the poetic. Her exploration of her bond (or lack of) with Helen bleeds into examining her own desire to have a child: should she attempt to heal past traumas by being a nurturing parent or should she simply — in her words — “cut the line”. And while that universal question of what makes a “good” mother remains unanswered (and, perhaps, is unanswerable), Selby and her collaborators have nevertheless given life to a work of candour and compassion.