Motherboard Review: Victoria Mapplebeck’s Intimate Portrait of Parenting in the Smartphone Age
Motherboard Review: Victoria Mapplebeck’s Intimate Portrait of Parenting in the Smartphone Age
In the 21st century, parenthood has doubled as a kind of ongoing film project. Babies born in the early 2000s grew up under the constant click of digital cameras, and by the time they started school, iPhones were already documenting their lives. While much has been said about the risks of raising children in an era of nonstop recording, Victoria Mapplebeck’s Motherboard points to a brighter side: the chance to shape memory itself.
Filmed almost entirely on phones, Mapplebeck’s documentary follows her son Jim from birth in 2004 through his first 20 years. The result is a portrait saturated with images — toothy smiles, gangly growth spurts, awkward teenage moments. Sometimes she revels in this flood of material, cutting it into vibrant collages. At other points, the silences and omissions speak louder: Jim’s father, rarely on camera, becomes a ghostly presence whose absence quietly drives the story.
Mapplebeck’s editing approach is as inventive as it is intimate. Transitioning from classic DV-camera shoots to successive generations of iPhones, she constructs a visual tapestry that intertwines time’s passage with emotional texture. Early gestures—like gesturing thumbs-up from a womb during an ultrasound—morph into slow-motion montage, sunset-lit transitions, and spontaneous teenage footage, capturing life’s ebb and flow with cinematic flair BFI. Dialogue is rarely voice-over; instead, the narrative advances through text-message pop-ups, voicemails, and ambient phone calls. Jim, credited as a creative consultant, helps shape what stays and what’s left out—ensuring the film feels like a genuine collaboration, not a one-sided exhibition of shoal-swimming memories.
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In UK cinemas now
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Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: joanne@theappwhisperer.com
