Blue Bag Life

In 2017, mixed media artist Lisa Sel­by and her part­ner Elliot Muraws­ki opened an Insta­gram account using the han­dle @bluebaglife, named after the small pieces of blue plas­tic car­ri­er bag that are com­mon­ly used as wrap­pings for drugs. Sel­by would use this account to chron­i­cle her sec­ond-hand expe­ri­ence with addic­tion through her part­ner, as well as her estranged moth­er, both of whom had been addict­ed to hero­in. Soon after, the account would grow and become a source of com­mu­ni­ty for peo­ple deal­ing with all forms of addic­tion and strug­gles with men­tal health.

With this epony­mous­ly titled doc­u­men­tary, Sel­by takes this deeply per­son­al, con­fronting­ly unfil­tered approach of doc­u­men­ta­tion even fur­ther, though the locus here is slight­ly shift­ed; for it’s the com­plex­i­ties and melan­cho­lia of moth­er­hood, as much as addic­tion, that lie at the heart of the film. When Sel­by was only 10 months old, her moth­er, Helen, would drop her off at the babysitter’s, nev­er to return for her. Sel­by would be raised by her father in an East Lon­don coun­cil flat, and would curi­ous­ly come to idolise her estranged moth­er through­out her ado­les­cence. At that time Helen was, to her, ​“bet­ter than Madonna”.

Yet this man­i­fests quite dif­fer­ent­ly in Selby’s adult life. Words most com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the mater­nal have come to inspire a pro­found sense of dis­com­fort in her. ​“Mum: the word that doesn’t feel good. It’s not my word. It’s every­one else’s word”, she explains through diaris­tic voiceover in the film’s open­ing sequence.

Sen­si­tive­ly assem­bled with the help of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Rebec­ca Lloyd-Evans and edi­tor Alex Fry, the film is most­ly com­prised of shaky home record­ings that Sel­by has been shoot­ing on her phone over the years, as well as scat­tered puz­zle pieces of Helen’s per­son­hood as gleaned from pho­to albums, tes­ti­monies of peo­ple who had more inti­mate access to her, and belong­ings left behind in her clut­tered, nee­dle-strewn South Lon­don base­ment flat. We see snip­pets of Helen sourced from the one filmed inter­view that Sel­by had con­duct­ed with her pep­pered through­out the film, and these soon become the sole frag­ments of what the film­mak­er has left of her mother.

When Helen is diag­nosed with breast can­cer, her hero­in addic­tion ren­ders her inel­i­gi­ble for treat­ment, and dur­ing the course of the film, she pass­es away, fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing Selby’s attempts to piece togeth­er who her moth­er was and under­stand the cir­cum­stances that made her leave her daugh­ter behind. It’s also around this time that Elliot relaps­es and even­tu­al­ly goes to prison for drug dealing.

Blue Bag Life nev­er promis­es to encap­su­late the speci­fici­ties of either Helen’s or Elliot’s strug­gles with addic­tion or recov­ery. Rather, it unfurls as a thor­ough­ly per­son­al and artis­tic reflec­tion, like a com­bi­na­tion of a diary and a scrap­book; an hon­est piece of art that radi­ates com­pas­sion and brims with sin­cer­i­ty in attempt­ing to dis­en­tan­gle the emo­tion­al depths of such vul­ner­a­ble and pri­vate expe­ri­ences as relat­ed to addic­tion and sub­stance abuse, and the heal­ing that’s pos­si­ble in the aftermath.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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