26 January – 19:30 The Venue
UK 2022
Dir: Carol Morley
Cert: 12A
106 mins
Starring: Monica Dolan, Kelly McDonald, Gina McKee
Most people will almost certainly not have heard of the artist Audrey Amiss. She started her training at the Royal Academy in the 1950s, but could not finish her studies owing to mental illness, which led to her being in and out of institutions for the rest of her life. Her body of work, which documents her daily existence in a primitive, impressionistic style, only came to light in recent years. Writer and director Carol Morley has responded imaginatively and with compassion to Amiss’s life and work, and in her film she has artist and social worker Sandra embark upon a lengthy, fictionalised road trip in order to stage an exhibition of the artist’s work in Sunderland, her home town. The relationship between the cantankerous, impossibly demanding Amiss and the long suffering Sandra is at the core of this bitter-sweet, darkly comic film.
Trailer:
