Blue Bag Life: Q&A with the filmmakers behind the unconventional documentary

Join WFTV for a conversation with the filmmakers from the upcoming unconventional documentary film: Blue Bag Life. The panel will include subject and director Lisa Selby, director Rebecca Lloyd Evans and producer Natasha Dack Ojumu.

A link to watch the film will be included in your registration conifrmation email.

Event Schedule:

18:25: Please join the webinar waiting room

18:30: Panel talk

19:15: Audience Q&A

19:30: Finish

Blue Bag Life Synopsis:

Blue Bag Life is a story gleaned from material collected over a lifetime.

Lisa Selby, an artist and lecturer, has always documented her life in paint, words, photographs and film. As Lisa struggles to comprehend why her mother Helen didn’t raise her, Helen dies.

Helen was charismatic, articulate, beautiful and addicted to heroin. Lisa now begins to get to know the woman she never called Mother, through the things she left behind and the memories of people who knew her.

Lisa’s partner, Elliot, relapses on heroin and is incarcerated. Through her own sobriety and her love for Elliot, Lisa comes to understand addiction, and Helen, differently. She also uncovers a new possibility towards motherhood deep within herself.

You can watch the trailer here.

Bios:

Lisa Selby, Subject and Director

Lisa Selby is an Artist and Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.

As well as creating an online platform for an ever-growing community (@bluebaglife), Lisa’s art practice has diverse outputs of exhibitions, writing, talks and workshops in UK prisons. Key works and solo exhibitions include Wing, Hong Kong and Outpost Gallery, Norwich; Constraint Restraint at the National Justice Museum; a contribution to Carl Cattermole’s Prison: A Survival Guide (Penguin Books); and the TEDx talk Prison and Addiction: the undoing of shame. 

Lisa has received funding from: ACE; British Council; a-n; and AxisWeb. Lisa has been awarded the role of Ambassador, 2021, for Snapping the Stiletto: Campaigning for Equality, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. This is a project which aims to seek equality and challenge stereotypes by sharing and celebrating the stories of Essex women. She is also an advisor for Radical Recruit, an innovative social recruitment consultancy; working exclusively with disadvantaged candidates from marginalised communities.

Rebecca Lloyd Evans, Director

Rebecca Lloyd-Evans is a BAFTA nominated director working across multiple genres and mediums. 

She has an instinct for complex human stories that speak to wider issues. Her work often has a life beyond the screen, lobbying the government and encouraging change. She is committed to work that interrogates the criminal justice system, including Missing Dads (CBBC) and the award winning BBC podcast series' Prison Bag and Prison Break. Rebecca loves experimenting with ways of storytelling, for example Grit/Oyster (The Uncertain Kingdom anthology) which explores female sexual fantasy through visually interpreted audio interviews; and Daphne and Apollo (BBC Radio 4) a hybrid doc-fiction about coercive control. 

Rebecca has worked with Penny Woolcock on a number of projects including the film One Mile Away, which won the Michael Powell Award for Best British Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Collaboration is where Rebecca thrives, she had previously worked with every one of the Blue Bag Life collective and brought them together for the making of this film.

Natasha Dack Ojumu, Producer

Producer Natasha Dack Ojumu has over 20 years’ experience in the film and TV industry.

She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and Edinburgh University, and co-founder of Tigerlily Productions, a company renowned for its award-winning output of distinctive feature films, documentaries, arts, history and current affairs programmes.

 Feature films produced by Natasha include the North Korean feature doc The Lovers and the Despot, which premiered at Sundance, was released by Magnolia in the US and picked up by Netflix, the genre bending cult thriller Remainder by artist Omer Fast, the Locarno Golden Leopard winning She, A Chinese by Chinese novelist Xiaolu Guo, and the Berlinale prize winning documentary 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep. As executive producer she’s worked on a range of feature documentaries including most recently Poly Styrene: I am a Cliché, A Deal with the Universe and Dying to Divorce. Natasha is experienced in putting together international co-productions, accessing tax credits and regional funding, and preselling projects to international broadcasters. 

Over the last few years Natasha has produced films for Channel 4’s flagship current affairs strand, Dispatches (including the first documentary to be made about the fall of movie producer Harvey Weinstein), and for Imagine, BBC1’s flagship arts programme (about world renowned artist Olafur Eliasson). Currently in production is the feature documentary White Nanny Black Kids (w/t) about the unofficial fostering of West African children and babies into white British families. 

Two feature docs produced by Natasha have their world premieres at this year’s LFF. Kanaval in which carnival troupes in a small Haitian seaside town tell the story of their country, and Blue Bag Life.

Natasha has also mentored newcomers to the industry, served on various Bafta and film festival juries and in 2019 was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

How will the online event work?

This event will be live streamed via Zoom.us. Viewing details will be sent via your confirmation.

Attending participants will not be visible to others and will be muted throughout the session. After the talk, there will be an opportunity for audience members to ask questions by using the Q&A feature.

This event is for existing WFTV members only.

If you are not a member and would like to join, membership costs just £100 + VAT/yr , please click here or email admin@wftv.org.uk

At WFTV, we want our events to be accessible for everyone. If you have any access requirements, please let us know in advance and we will do our best to accommodate you. Please contact admin@wftv.org.uk and we will get back to you as soon as possible.