As a mother I couldn’t imagine anything worse than having to give away my child, but in 18th-century England, thousands of babies were abandoned. It’s a world I’ve delved into for my new film, Balls, inspired by the character of Heathcliff, who was found as a child on the streets of Liverpool in Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights.
I was approached by the Brontë Parsonage Museum last year to become a creative partner for the bicentenary celebrations, commissioned with making a piece of work related to Brontë’s life and work. It came as a delightful surprise. I’ve always felt very connected to Wuthering Heights without knowing a lot about its author, beyond being intrigued by the fact that she used Ellis Bell as a pseudonym to publish under (I’ve even used Ellis Bell in the past as an email address). It is such a powerful and affecting novel; it left its mark on me when I first read it as a teenager and has stayed with me throughout my life.
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I wanted to better understand Brontë’s motivations for writing the book, and for creating the foundling, Heathcliff, particularly because I am a Fellow for the Foundling Museum, a space dedicated to London’s Foundling Hospital. The hospital was essentially an orphanage, set up in 1739 in response to the many abandoned children of the time. I wanted to understand what England was like in Brontë’s time (the 19th century) and when Heathcliff was supposed to have been born (the 18th century), and so I dug into the extraordinary archives of the museum.
Documentary didn’t feel like the right medium to explore this historical story, so I welcomed the opportunity to direct my first fiction film, which presents very different possibilities and challenges. I decided early on to set the film in the modern day, feeling it would be more powerful to present the narrative in contemporary language, so it felt less distant.
When Mark Donne, editor at Rapid Response Unit (RRU), a cultural news project in Liverpool, got in contact to ask if I would be interested in working with them, it felt like a perfect fit to bring RRU on board. As well as having a direct connection to Heathcliff, Liverpool was a hub of the slave trade and Irish immigrants, and there are many references to Heathcliff that suggest he might have been of slave descent or Irish, so it felt important to set it there from a historical perspective.
There was always greater demand than supply for places at the Foundling Hospital, and the Balls title both directly references a crude and surreal lottery ball system that was in place, and offers a quiet nod to the prevailing patriarchy, a well as reflecting the courage these women showed. For its first four decades, women would come to the hospital at night – street lights dimmed to save dignity – to draw balls from a bag. A white ball would offer their baby a place, a black ball denied them one, and a red ball meant they would get a second chance if any of the white ball babies were too sick to stay. Later, a petitioning system was introduced, overlapping with the lottery process for 10 years, whereby the women were interviewed by a panel of male governors about the circumstances of their relationship and pregnancy.
In the film we explore the period of time when the two processes overlapped, and using two real women's stories we found in the archives ("Black Peggy" and Mary Ann), show the types of experiences these women were subjected to. I am told the film reads as a dystopian vision but these stories really happened. Lots of people referenced The Handmaid's Tale when I told them the premise for the film, but I wasn't familiar with the book or TV series when I wrote it.
Peggy is a challenging and complex part, with a strong emotional journey to make within a short space of time. We saw some very good actors, and I was very moved by Tia Bannon's performance. My friend Sarah Gadon [Alias Grace/True Detective] is brilliant and was the first person I thought of when it came to casting Mary Ann. I was telling her about my research for the film late last year when she made a pretty powerful suggestion for the narrative and how I might adapt it, which I adopted into my work. Filming with 10 babies at multiple locations on 16mm film was an ambitious concept and there was a huge amount of preparation required, but thankfully we had an incredibly dedicated producer, Kate Wilson, who was instrumental in bringing everything together.
I did get very emotional doing the research. There are huge piles of documentation, which you unfold to discover desperate stories: poverty, heartbreak, abandonment and rape. The reports are incredibly detailed, intrusive and judgemental: sharing intimate details of these women’s lives from their own perspectives and the perspectives of people who knew them. Sometimes I would find love letters enclosed to offer evidence of the father misleading the mother with promises of marriage, or notes to say the mother had returned many years later to reclaim the child.
This is our history, and it is real. It was the world Emily lived in and it is a world reflected in the violence of Wuthering Heights. It felt important to try to touch and acknowledge this history, and it made me ultimately feel positive about how much our society has progressed in its treatment of women and children – though of course we still have some way to go.
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Balls was jointly commissioned by The Brontë Society, The Foundling Museum and RRU, a cultural, Liverpool-led project fusing international artists and news. The film will premiere at Liverpool’s Picturehouse at FACT on August 2, followed by a panel conversation chaired by Bonnie Greer OBE, Lily Cole, Michael Stewart and Dr Simon Marsden. It will then screen at national and international film festivals, and at the Foundling Museum until December 2.
