Blue Bag Life: a painful examination of addiction and abandonment
Shot on shaky iPhones and video cameras, this visibly raw documentary by British artist Lisa Selby plumbs her late mother’s addiction to heroin, and attempts to glean meaning from the physical remnants of a ravaged life.
“Disconnection is the only motherhood I have ever known.” There are lines spoken in Blue Bag Life, British artist Lisa Selby’s unflinching documentary about how lives are marked by addiction, that sting like an exposed cut. The loss of Lisa’s estranged mother Helen to cancer following a lifetime of substance abuse prompts Lisa to embark on a journey of self-revelation. Filming becomes both a therapeutic tool and a proxy interlocuter between her and the outside world, as Lisa starts to untangle the tightly knotted cords of addiction, neglect, shame, and self-worth.
The rawness of the material is palpable in Selby’s uncompromising approach, as well as in how the film looks and feels. Blue Bag Life is shot in a piecemeal, reactive, non-linear fashion that echoes the lurching, wildly up-and-down nature of grief. Shot on shaky, handheld iPhones and video cameras, it shapes a lifetime’s worth of material into a deeply personal collage. Back in 2017, Selby and her partner Elliot Murawski, who around this time was sent to prison for drug-dealing after relapsing, gained online notoriety for their popular Instagram page @Bluebaglife, which documented their joint stories of substance dependency and love. At times, Blue Bag Life has the feel of a social media page come to life, with its filmed footage, screengrabs, photographs, and Selby’s artwork.
Named after the blue ‘baggies’ of heroin that remind Lisa of abandonment, the film is appropriately narrated through a compendium of objects, the things that make up a life. Anyone who’s had to sort through a deceased person’s stuff will identify with the pain and the hassle of what’s left behind. In this case, the objects – some of them meaningful, most of them not – are made to speak for the absent presence of Helen, the glamorous, charismatic, impossibly sad centre of the film. Through the junk and drug paraphernalia in her mother’s squalid flat, the pile of letters, and photographs of a mysterious young woman, Lisa pieces together part of the puzzle of maternal neglect. Blue Bag Life is as much as about the complexities of motherhood as it is about addiction; specifically, how trauma gets passed down through generations and how important it is to break that cycle.
Blue Bag Life won the Audience Award at last year’s London Film Festival, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a film that catches you by surprise. No matter how harrowing the material gets, it never verges on misery porn – it brims with so much honesty and warmth.
► Blue Bag Life is in UK cinemas from Friday.