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There’s a scene in the documentary Motherboard where single parenthood is clearly falling apart. While filmmaker Victoria Mapplebeck undergoes breast cancer treatment, her 14-year-old son Jim is out partying and skipping homework. After a heated argument, he storms out. She records their phone call afterward. “When he said he couldn’t wait to move out, it felt like a dagger to the heart,” she admits. “That year with cancer was when life got really hard, and I was filming it all at once.”
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Back in 2004, when Mapplebeck became pregnant after a brief relationship with a man who didn’t want to be a father, she remembered Cyril Connolly’s famous quote about how parenthood could stifle creativity. “So I pointed my camera at that challenge to find a way to balance filmmaking and motherhood,” she says. Shot over 20 years on various phones, Motherboard is a documentary filled with risk, heartache, and humor.
We first meet Jim as a fetus on an ultrasound, giving his mom a thumbs-up. Over the next 90 minutes, we watch him grow into a kind, funny young man. As a long-term project, the film has been compared to Michael Apted’s Seven Up! (1964), which tracked children over decades, and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), filmed over 12 years with the same cast. But unlike those films, where directors stayed behind the scenes, Motherboard puts Mapplebeck front and center, showing her juggling parenting and filmmaking.
When she got pregnant at 38, Mapplebeck was a freelance TV director—not the most stable job. Realizing she’d be raising a child alone, she switched to teaching. A digital media pioneer (she made Channel 4’s first webcam series, Smart Hearts, in 1999), her expertise in VR and iPhone filmmaking led to her becoming a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Missing filmmaking, she created 160 Characters (2015), a short film about Jim’s conception, using old texts from her Nokia. Later, Missed Call (2019) explored Jim’s wish, at 13, to meet his absent father. That film won a BAFTA, but their happy moment onstage hid a darker truth—Mapplebeck was undergoing cancer treatment, unsure if she’d live to see Jim grow up.
She had already started filming her treatment as a VR project for The Guardian: “I’ve always processed pain through a lens, and it usually helps. With cancer, you have no control—you just have to accept it. It’s not about staying positive; it’s luck. Filming gave me some agency, a way to document how illness reshapes family life.”
Jim was hesitant at first: “Even trying to see it from her perspective, it didn’t make sense. But I realized therapy looks different for everyone. For my mum, the camera was her way of coping. Once I saw how much it helped her, I supported it.”
Now 21, Jim is studying drama.
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Jim still lives in the same south London flat his mother moved into before he was born. Deeply involved in the filmmaking process, he’s credited as creative consultant on Motherboard. Reflecting on the 18-month editing period with his mother, he recalls: “It was funny because we had separate lives. I’d come home to a dark flat—you’d been so busy working that all the lights were off except for your computer screen. You’d say, ‘Can you watch this?’ I regularly reviewed cuts and shared my thoughts. It was really cool.”
Mapplebeck emphasizes how carefully they avoided adding to Jim’s anxieties during filming: “We didn’t record the hardest moments as they happened. That was intentional. I never came home from the oncologist and immediately filmed Jim hearing bad news. Those conversations happened off-camera. Later, we’d record reflections. I disagree that only live footage works—having time to process created better material.”
Jim emerges as a natural performer throughout, from childhood songs to school plays. He admits: “I enjoy being the center of attention as an actor. I’m grateful we can be honest with each other.”
Not all footage came from Mapplebeck—scenes of Jim at music festivals or with friends were shot on his phone. Jim remembers: “Mom would ask, ‘Can I use this?’ It was nice including my friends—they’ve been so important, especially during those years.”
The film incorporates their texts and calls, even during strained periods of cancer treatment and COVID lockdowns. Once Jim texted: “I can’t think straight anymore—this year needs to fuck off.” Unlike “sharenting” influencers who broadcast children’s lives without consent, Mapplebeck and Jim had ongoing discussions: “For three years we reviewed cuts together, asking, ‘How do you feel about this?'” She filmed their consent conversations, including one where Jim joked: “Nineteen minutes recording! You’re a thief!”
Their hardest decision was including a post-argument phone call. Mapplebeck recalls: “You’d stormed out during COVID pre-vaccine days, and I worried you’d infect your grandma. You were screaming ‘Shut up!’ It’s raw.” Jim worried: “People might hate me for how I talked to you.” But at a test screening, he saw the scene worked as intended: “Jim felt the audience’s understanding—they’d either been that teenager or raised one.”I’ve been that parent—or both—and everyone understood. No one judged him or looked down on him, and that was a real turning point. Jim told me, “You can’t make a film about parenting without showing the tough parts.”
“People might say I made this film to please my mum,” Jim adds, “but there was no little devil on my shoulder whispering, ‘Do this for her.’ If I hadn’t wanted to make it, it wouldn’t have happened.”
Mapplebeck got advice from OKRE (Opening Knowledge across Research and Entertainment) on protecting Jim, as well as legal guidance to keep his father’s identity hidden. “I didn’t want internet detectives digging into it, and I’ve never been interested in naming or shaming him, or even judging his choices. It was a real lightbulb moment when I realized, ‘I don’t need to try to understand his mindset.'”
“I’ll never fully grasp his experiences or what led him to those decisions. The legal advice we’ve always had is clear: ‘You can tell your story. You have the right to your truth—an honest account of how this situation affected you.'”
A 2013 study found that 13% of fathers reported having no contact with children who didn’t live with them. Jim was 14 when he first met his dad. They saw each other three times that year and haven’t met since. Jim feels neutral about him: “I don’t hate him at all—I don’t even dislike him. I just see it as: he made his choices, I’ve made mine. I wouldn’t want him to watch the film and regret anything. We all make decisions, and maybe someday he’ll think his wasn’t the best, but I wouldn’t want him to feel guilty. I know I have a dad out there, but I’m very happy with my family now. Who knows if I’d be the same person if he’d been in my life?”
Motherboard is in cinemas 15 August.
This article was amended on 29 July 2025 to clarify that the 13% figure refers to fathers who reported no contact with children not living with them.
