Rob Munday
Filmmaking can be a deeply personal experience. For UK-based artist and director Victoria Mapplebeck she has shared her life through her short films. From unplanned pregnancies to absent fathers, we’ve journeyed with her through some of her most important life events and shared in the emotion she has felt along the way. In Guardian documentary The Waiting Room we join her as she battles through her most challenging times yet – Cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Created in what could almost be described as her trademark style, The Waiting Room is a combination of phone footage (Shot on an iPhone X) and Screenlife graphics (text messages, search engines etc). Inviting us to experience her time in waiting rooms, surgery and chemotherapy, we hear reactions from Mapplebeck, her teenage son and friends and family, through recorded conversations and voicemails. A candid look at illness from a patient’s point of view, The Waiting Room allows an audience to come to grips with what we can and cannot control when our bodies fail us.
“I wanted to make visible, the often invisible parts of Cancer treatment”, Mapplebeck reveals in an interview for the BBC’s Click. Explaining to The Guardian, where the film premiered online, that she wanted to make a film which “challenges the cultural myths that surround the disease and puts the language of illness under the microscope”, The Waiting Room is a film that works on multiple levels. Firstly, it feels like its creation was instrumental in helping Mapplebeck deal with her diagnosis and what it might mean going forward. Secondly, by placing the viewer in the patient’s perspective, it’s an important reminder of the fragility of life.
Alongside this 30-minute documentary, Mapplebeck has also created an accompanying VR piece entitled The Waiting Room VR. A 9-minute 360-degree video, that consists of a reconstruction of her last session of radiotherapy (which marked the end of nine months of breast cancer treatment) and CGI graphics that takes the audience inside her body. “I’ve always been struck by the beauty of microscopic imaging”, the filmmaker explains while discussing her film with IMMERSEUK.ORG. “Within this VR work when the user embodies the tumour, they will marvel at the beauty of cancer cells as they split and multiply”.