'I hated that feeling of my life being in someone else's hands, so I started filming'

Daisy-May Hudson’s latest movie is a damning indictment of Britain’s social care system. She tells Ellie Harrison about her own homelessness and using storytelling to overcome shame

- Ellie Harrison

The British director Daisy-May Hudson was sitting in the library at Manchester University, writing her dissertation, when she found out she’d lost her family home. Her mum, in a state of shock, delivered the news on the phone, telling Hudson that the house she and her sister had grown up in was going to be knocked down and made into a car park. In the 13 years they had lived in Epping, rent prices had soared and they couldn’t afford to move into a new place. In a matter of weeks, they would be homeless.

“It was a very surreal moment,” says Hudson, now 35. “There were tears, and then this feeling of powerlessness.” Hudson, her 13-year-old sister and their mum spent the next two years moving between strip-lit hostels, stuck in agonising limbo while they waited to be allocated a permanent home. Every desperate, anguished email sent to the housing office was met with the same robotic response: “Thank you for your enquiry, we will get back to you in due course.”

“I hated that feeling of my life being in someone else’s hands,” she says, “so that’s why I started filming the experience. It enabled me to feel like I was actually doing something and taking the power back.” She captured every painful moment on camera, her previously effervescent mum waning as the months rolled on and the instability of temporary housing took its toll. The resulting 2015 documentary, Half Way, was the first-ever film to be used as evidence in a parliamentary enquiry into homelessness. Hudson was named a Bafta Breakthrough Brit.

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