Set in North London in 1965, Prudence reflects on a lifetime of isolation.
Prudence Barker was brought to a women's mental hospital in north London on her twentieth birthday, in 1920, because her father had decided she was morally deficient and mentally unstable. She was not consulted. She was still there in 1965, when the film finds her, and by then everyone who might have petitioned for her release was dead.
Set in 1965, Prudence is a woman struggling to keep her sanity after almost a lifetime of disgraceful incarceration.
The reason she gives is an ordinary one, and that is the horror of it. Her mother died giving birth to her and her father never forgave her for it. She wanted to draw and was beaten until she could not hold the pencil. During the Great War she had the freedom of the house because everybody was busy elsewhere. She danced in the street on the night the war ended, caught Spanish influenza, and came out of it planning to train as a stenographer or a florist and share a flat with other girls. She was under twenty-one and needed her father's permission. He wanted her married to a rich man she knew perfectly well did not want a wife. She said she preferred the neighbour who had come home with RAF wings on his chest. He knocked her head against the sideboard and she was unconscious for days. The committal was arranged while she recovered.
The film has garnered 17 awards across all crafts including Best Film, Best Actress (several times for Carol Royle) and some honourable mentions.
This short was filmed on 8 July 2020 under strict Covid-19 protocols and completed in April 2022.
Told almost entirely in reflection, the film gives its single performance the whole of its eleven minutes. Carol Royle plays Prudence, and A D Cooper wrote, produced and directed.
What she has instead of a life is an inventory, kept in the same dry voice throughout: the bridge games the long-stayers are punished for, the paper she is not allowed to waste on letters, the fact that nobody ever visited, the relief of being too old now to interest the orderlies. It ends with her talking to the spiders on the ceiling, who have names, and being glad of the company. Britain's asylum population peaked in the middle of the twentieth century. Among the tens of thousands of women inside were some whose only diagnosis had been the disobedience of a daughter. A D Cooper talks about the film, and about working with Carol Royle, in Yoreflix Stories.