My Exploding House

The early strands of ideas for this film began in 2020 when my father had been diagnosed with early onset dementia and I was simultaneously a new mum telling bedtime stories. It seemed as though one generation’s memories were disappearing while another’s were being made, and storytelling was entwined in both.

The approach of this film is new for me. Generally, I would hear first-hand from my subject about their story and map it out before filming, knowing pretty much where the story would end up. My Exploding House was the first time it was a story that I was both subject and filmmaker. It was also the first time I’d ever worked with my mother, Gill. I had to trust the film would take shape as the process progressed as there were so many unknowns.

This film is clearly very personal, though delves in to much wider themes. Partly it is about absence and loss, of the physical, the past, the truth. So the idea of recreating the house in a scale model was a practical one for a few reasons; the original house has been demolished, I knew I didn’t want to make an archive-only film, but it was also a playful device to journey into that time and place and a way of entering conversations that Gill and I had never had. The process of making it together also felt defiant - we were reclaiming something taken from us.

The quest that opens My Exploding House, to find a once-watched film in which my house may or may not have featured being exploded, was a true quest. We had no title, channel, date, nor recalled any of the cast. However, though we were truly curious to find the film, as the quest progressed it began to convey something of the absurdity of searching for ‘what is real’ in memories. I began to question whether the original facts of ‘truth’ matters that much at all, which for a documentary filmmaker is an interesting place to be.

Discovering with an adult perspective more about the history of the No M11 Link Road Campaign has been moving, fascinating, and made more sense of of things I only half-knew or half-felt as a child.

Overall the film was one of the hardest I have ever made, though very rewarding for both myself and Gill. It also has given me deeper trust in the process and the twists and turns of filmmaking (as well as in life).