‘Lollipop’ is very much in the best tradition of Ken Loach or Lynn Ramsey with a working class mother, Molly (Posy Sterling), newly released from prison who finds that the world she encounters outside of jail is tougher than the world she left behind. Molly naïvely imagines that she will simply be able to return to her two children. But she has to deal first with a bureaucracy who don’t make it easy for her to see her children again, setting the system up as the antagonist against whom she has to fight if her son and daughter are to be reclaimed from the care system that her own selfish mother put them in while Molly was in prison.

This all lends ‘Lollipop’ a hard-as-nails but tender and heartrending dimension. Fundamentally, this film asks the question as to whether a biological mother who doesn’t have somewhere to live because, as the benefits people tell her, she voluntarily gave up her home in order to go to prison is best equipped to be her children’s custodian. Molly has a limited amount of time to find a home in a system that doesn’t prioritise her welfare if she is to have her children back again, and we watch Molly and feel her sense of humiliation and anger at having a foster parent do the job that she is itching to have back the film.

‘Lollipop’ deals very effectively with the judgementalism and taboo that Molly has to deal with every day, and it is a fitting counterpart to Loach’s ‘I, Daniel Blake’ in the way in which it shows a benefits system which sees many vulnerable people slip through its cracks. There are, though, kindly and unexpected saviour figures for example in the form of Amina (Idil Ahmed), Molly’s childhood friend whose suggestion of cohabitation is one that mirrors the non-traditional ways of living that lie at the heart of the 2021 Oscar winning ‘Nomadland’. Sometimes, the film is telling us, not everyone fits effortlessly into a configuration of how they live that we would consider mainstream or normative, yet where the essential optimism of humanity is so readily on display. The cast list is also almost exclusively female.