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Director: Clio Barnard Writer: Clio Barnard Starring: Manjinder Virk, Jimi Mistry, Christine Bottomley, Natalie Gavin, Monica Dolan, Danny Web, Neil Dudgeon, Kathryn Pogson, Jonathan Jaynes In what has come to be known as verbatim theatre, transcripts of interviews, hearings and/or trials are dramatised on stage by actors. Rob Epstein’s film Howl is probably the best cinematic example of this novel storytelling technique, but director Clio Barnard really ups the ante by having her actors lip-sync their dialogue to audio-recorded interviews, further morphing the line between reality and fiction. Barnard’s film is about Andrea Dunbar, the West Yorkshire author of three gritty social-realist plays who died in 1990 of a brain hemorrhage at the ripe young age of 29. Dunbar hailed from Bradford, England's rough and tumble Buttershaw Estate (dubbed "the Arbor"). The dialogue in The Arbor is taken directly from interviews conducted by Barnard of Dunbar's family, friends and...

Andrea Dunbar shot to fame with Rita, Sue and Bob Too, her frank play about a Bradford estate. Now her own brief life is the subject of a film

The Buttershaw estate in Bradford is no longer the wilderness of burnt-out cars and waist-high grass depicted by its most famous resident, the playwright Andrea Dunbar, in the 1980s. A balmy Saturday morning finds most of the gardens well tended and the plain, postwar semis in a good state of repair. I'm here to watch the shooting of a new film about Dunbar's life. But when I head towards a cluster of vehicles that has attracted a crowd of onlookers, I discover that they belong not to film-makers, but the police. What's going on? "Drugs raid," says a bystander. "Welcome to Buttershaw."

The film unit, it turns out, is in the next street, Brafferton Arbor, where Dunbar grew up, and after which her first play,...