'I know how important it is to have a safe space to call home'

According to data from the UK’s Prison Reform Trust, an estimated 17,000 children are affected by their mothers being imprisoned every year. These stays tend to be short, with six in 10 women serving prison sentences of less than six months, but the true impact of the sentence lasts much longer, with many losing their homes and families in the process: only half of women left prison with settled accommodation in the year to March 2023.

These are the cold, hard facts behind the story of Molly, the protagonist in Daisy-May Hudson’s film Lollipop. We meet single mum Molly, played by The Outrun star Posy Sterling, in the final stretch of her four-month prison sentence as she’s desperately longing to be reunited with her young children, Ava, 11, and Leo, 5. However, upon her release, she’s denied this yearned-for reunion: she’s lost her home due to the incarceration, and with nowhere to go but a tent, social services won’t release her kids from foster care.

What follows is a desperate tale of a mother’s anguish as she tries to navigate a broken system to bring her family back together. Without a home, her children can’t be released into her care, but without her kids, she isn’t eligible for accommodation from the local council that’s adequate for the family’s needs — a truly life-altering catch 22.

This story is all too familiar to Hudson, a filmmaker with lived experience of homelessness. Lollipop marks her first scripted film, having experience in documentary making such as Half Way, a film she made about her family’s experiences of living in a homeless hostel over a year in 2013.

“I think I deeply knew just how important it was to have a safe space to call home and how it really is the foundation and bedrock of every other aspect of your life, like, I had lived experience of that,” the writer-director explains.

“Someone got in touch with me and spoke to me about this catch 22 (of) women slipping through the cracks — if you come out of prison and you’re trying to get your children back, if you can’t get access to housing which is the correct size, and if you don’t have housing, you can’t get your children back.

“That kind of absolute powerlessness and just kind of butting your head against a wall of bureaucracy that’s not really talking to each other and not making sense, I think I really connected with.”

While Lollipop tells a fictional story, it’s one that’s rooted deeply in the reality faced by women and children across the UK. Hudson drew on her own experiences of the housing system and those of formerly incarcerated mothers to paint a picture that’s unflinchingly honest and heartbreakingly real.

“Even though it’s told from the perspective of a woman going through it, played by Posy Sterling, I really wanted the film to feel just truthful, not biased,” Hudson says.

“And it’s so experiential, like, you feel it with Molly, you’re right there with her the whole time, going through it, experiencing it with her. But it was so important that there was no blame within the portrayal of this system.

“I don’t believe that people go into the jobs to cause harm, or because they don’t care. I think they care, and then they’re limited by a system that doesn’t work, really. So I feel like my role as a storyteller is to bring that truth to light.”

Despite Molly’s story being so full of heartbreaking moments bound to bring audiences to tears, Hudson felt it pertinent to imbue the narrative with levity, humour and joy wherever possible.

At the heart of the tale is a beautiful friendship between two mothers both navigating the broken housing and social care system, a platonic love story of two mums finding hope and solace in one another, a friend to lean on in the most difficult of times. Molly and Amina were best friends as kids, but life got in the way, and they reconnect after bumping into one another at the council offices.

Portraying such a powerful friendship authentically was easy for Sterling and newcomer Idil Ahmed, who was cast as Amina following a community call-out, “because we’ve got a wonderful friendship off screen,” Sterling smiles.

“It felt like that as soon as I met you, really,” she adds to her co-star.

“We had the chemistry test, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about Idil. I just think she radiates pure love, joy, warmth. She’s just an incredible human being.”

“We do bounce off each other,” Ahmed agrees.

“I think Amina’s so loving and, you know, she loves all that hugging! And then Molly’s a bit hard... but then Amina also needs that kind of push.

“I think they just bounce off each other,” she adds. “The energy’s so beautiful.”

A particularly powerful scene in Lollipop occurs in the aforementioned council offices when Molly, driven to the brink by the unnavigable bureaucracy and hypocrisy of the system, has a violent public breakdown.

“It was very emotional,” Sterling says of filming that scene.

“You know, I think there are a lot of women who are experiencing this in this country, there are a lot of women who have previously experienced it, and there was this feeling of, like, a line behind me of women.

“That’s all I can kind of describe it as, and that was on the forefront of my heart for sure.”

Dripping with Ken Loach-esque ferocity, Lollipop is a heartfelt drama with a powerful message about the brutal realities of navigating the housing and social care systems in the UK. But Hudson doesn’t want to tell people what to think: she just hopes audiences feel the force of the story in their hearts.

“I feel like my job was to show truth and joy and love, and that was the intention going into it — holding the hope and holding a vision... of possibility,” she says.

“We’ve had lived-experience women in the audience, and they said that they have felt seen for the first time... Or maybe people are in politics, and suddenly they’ve got this fire in their belly to create change. Or some people came out and they wanted to call their mum, you know, all these different ways that it resonates with people,” she adds.

“I feel grateful that it is affecting people in all of these magical ways. And, you know, there’s already so many brilliant women and people doing stuff in this sector.

“May this be a drop or a ripple in what already-incredible work is happening. I’m just kind of surrendering, and excited to see where it goes.”

Watch for Lollipop in selected cinemas.