Director: Carol Morley

Stars: Monica Dolan, Kelly McDonald, Gina McKee, Kieran Bew

Writer-director Carol Morley’s singular picture is a fictionalised road/buddy movie inspired by the real Sunderland artist Audrey Amiss. Broadly neglected during her life, Audrey’s work, which consisted of sketches and paintings, was revaluated following her death in 2013. Dogged by mental illness, Amiss also exhaustively maintained journals and scrapbooks where thoughts and observation sat alongside more quotidian matters, as well as pasted-in sweet wrappers and crisp bags. Utilising the journals, Morley imagines a road trip between Amiss and her long-suffering mental health carer Sandra Panzer (McDonald), when Amiss insists Sandra drives her three hundred miles to Sunderland to attend an exhibition in her honour. Nodding to the films of Patrick Keiller as well as to Bunyan and Cervantes, it’s an appropriately ramshackle magical realist paean to the artist and the North of England in general, replete with Morris dancers, mythical figures and a quick visit to the Angel of the North. It doesn’t quite coalesce and occasionally the whimsy feels a little affected, but it boasts a towering mercurial performance from Monica Dolan, sporting a convincing mackem accent, as Amiss veers between haughtiness, empathy and outright anarchy.

David Willoughby

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