In a crushingly personal dispatch from a family pushed off the edge of London’s housing boom, Daisy-May Hudson hits record on her camcorder as she, her mother Beverly and 13-year-old sister Bronte are evicted from their Epping home and forced into the purgatory of the hostels system. The younger sibling, afraid to stay there alone at night, dubs the pebbledashed lodging they are allocated “Hansel and Gretel’s thing in the woods”. They face an all-too-familiar austerity-Britain obstacle course: freefalling living standards, bureaucratic vindictiveness and stonewalling – plus paying a pretty penny (£500 a week) for the privilege.
What’s less obvious, and brought home especially well by Hudson’s insider perspective, is the undermining effect on mental health of this loss of control. In one curious sequence, a strained Beverly accuses Bronte of picking arguments; Bronte flatly denies ever opening her mouth. Even if Hudson could step out of the eye of this emotional storm, a more objective overview of the reasons for their treatment and the housing crisis overall might not even be possible, judging by the council’s refusal to let her shoot on their premises.
But the film wasn’t made to do that, so much as “take back power” in a depersonalising situation. Strangely, it’s the most trite images amid Hudson’s generally alert shot selection – water spiralling down plugholes, heart-shaped decorations offsetting tatty institutional wallpaper – that seem most poignant in their inadequacy. Hudson’s chronicle in support of her mother has a desperate, defiant quality, too: I, Beverly Hudson.
