Rebecca Lloyd-Evans and Lisa Selby’s feature documentary aims to explore the interconnected prisms of addiction and unorthodox motherhood.
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.
Published 6 Apr 2023
Keen to be immersed in this artist's rumination on addiction, mental health, love and loss.
Intimate, raw, bold in execution.
Lisa Selby demonstrates a compelling degree of artistic assurance.
Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet play a father and son pushed to the edge in this tender drug addiction drama.
Hugh Gibson’s 2016 documentary is a sensitive and important portrait of addicts in Toronto.
The trade in illegal drugs between Latin America and the US has been a favoured subject for mainstream filmmakers for decades.
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