I knew how important it was to have a safe space to call home

ACCORDING to data from the 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.

- Daisy-May Hudson, the writer-director of new film Lollipop, and its star Posy Sterling talk to RACHAEL DAVIS

These are the cold, hard facts behind the story of Molly, the protagonist in Daisy-May Hudson's film Lollipop. We meet the single mum, 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.

This story is all too familiar to Daisy-May, a filmmaker with experience of homelessness. Lollipop marks her first scripted film, having previously worked on the documentaries such as Half Way, a film she made about her family’s ences of living in a homeless hostel over a year in 2013.

"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, 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.