Blue Bag Life

Paraphernalia is a word that comes fully loaded. It could be any miscellany but it is also, particularly, associated with the trappings of drug use. Trappings, indeed, is also an appropriate word for an activity that often snares not just the user but anyone who happens to be in their orbit.

There's paraphernalia aplenty in this film from Lisa Selby - whose life it considers - co-directing with Rebecca Lloyd-Evans and Alex Fry. For a start, there's the explosion of paraphernalia in her estranged mother Helen's home - not just the twists of blue bags used to hold drugs, which give this film its title, but everything, everywhere, all at once. There's a tangle of tapes, spuds in a bag on the floor, clothes slumped in a mountain in the corner.

Then, there's the unseen paraphernalia of emotions that Selby feels not just about her difficult relationship with her mother but also her partner Elliot Murawski, who now helps other addicts but was incarcerated at the time of filming because of his own heroin use. Selby, who is also an artist and lecturer, talks to some of those who knew Helen, while she also frequently speaks candidly to the camera, taking it - and us - into her confidence about her experiences and her fears about her own potential for motherhood. There's a poignant sense of poetry underlying some of her interactions, while at other times she simply conveys pure rawness of feeling.

Raised chiefly by her dad after Helen, already addicted, abandoned her, Selby notes she still put her mum on a pedestal  - "She was better than Madonna for me". Down the years as she tried to keep contact with her mum, questions bubbled up and we see, in fragments of footage, a drunken Helen answering some of these. Those that aren't hang in the ether for Selby after Helen dies in 2017, as her daughter tries to work through her loss while not slipping back into her own alcohol addiction.

The situation is complex, something emphasised by the fragmented structure of this film, which moves forward and backward as Selby cycles through her emotions. Her forthright approach to her situation means this is never a wallow but it does strike a melancholy note, as the loneliness and hopelessness that can be generated by loving an addict shine out. "Where is that place they go to?" she wonders, when considering Helen and Eliot high on drugs, "That place that's not near me."

In exploring disconnection, Selby cuts through the paraphernalia and brings us close to her experience, making us want to reach out and hug her back.