“Sometimes you don’t need to have gone to film school”: Daisy-May Hudson on her debut fiction feature Lollipop

Daisy-May Hudson fell into filmmaking by accident. In 2013, when Hudson was in her early twenties and studying at university in Manchester, her mother and sister were abruptly evicted from their family home in East London. Hudson returned to help deal with the crisis and, in an attempt to wrestle back a sense of control, began to film their experience. 

The result was Half Way (2015), a feature-length micro-budget documentary, shot over two years, produced entirely independently and paid for through crowdfunder donations. Half Way ended up getting a theatrical release, and suddenly Hudson found herself newly positioned as both an outspoken activist for housing reform, and a rising star in British film.

A decade later, Hudson is returning to cinemas with her debut fiction feature. A heartfelt drama about homelessness and motherhood, Lollipop shares Half Way’s campaigning spirit and deep empathy. For Hudson, the move from documentary into fiction was, again, unplanned. In 2017, the production company Parkville Pictures approached Hudson and asked if she would consider writing a screenplay. “I never had; it was completely not on my radar. I’d always thought I’d make docs,” says Hudson, when we speak on a video call.

Then she remembered an idea for a documentary she had wanted to make a few years previously, about women fighting for custody of their children. Hudson realised that fiction might provide a route to tell these women’s stories. “I didn’t feel comfortable putting these women on screen as victims, as they were going through this trauma related to the family courts and having their children removed,” she says. “But I thought that if I could write it, then I could write in joy, and in empowerment, about all these beautiful things which make women who they are.”

Beauty and joy do indeed permeate Lollipop, despite the dark subject matter. The film centres on Molly (Posy Sterling), a young woman recently released from a short prison term. After a dispute with her alcoholic mother (TerriAnn Cousins), Molly is left in hellish bureaucratic limbo: unable to regain custody of her two children because she cannot provide a home for them, but unable to apply for a council house without custody. 

In this impossible situation, a ray of hope comes from a chance encounter with a former school friend and fellow single mother, Amina (Idil Ahmed), who is living in temporary accommodation. Together, the two women try to find a way through this broken system.

Lollipop has a charming, almost old-fashioned tone, which feels more closely aligned with the grand tradition of British social realism – the sincere, morally urgent films of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Clio Barnard – than the archer, more stylised work of Hudson’s direct peers (the likes of Luna Carmoon, Charlotte Regan and Molly Manning Walker, all of whom have recently made impressive debuts centring young working-class women and girls). 

The film’s performances, which come from an almost entirely female cast of professional and non-professional actors, are key to Lollipop’s refreshing energy. For her first feature Hudson worked with the casting director Lucy Pardee, whose work on the likes of American Honey (2016), Dirty God (2019) and Rocks (2019) demonstrates her exceptional eye for new talent. “Lucy Pardee is a casting hero of mine, so when she said yes I was just so grateful,” says Hudson. “I didn’t realise how much she carried these values of care through the casting process. When we were looking for actors with lived experience of the issues that we’re talking about in the film, or who have never acted before, she really took a lot of care and was able to explain things to them for the first time.”

Pardee had spotted Posy Sterling in a short film for Clean Break, a theatre company made up of women who have experience of the criminal justice system, and immediately recommended her for the lead role. Sterling was the first person to audition, and it was immediately apparent that she was perfect. “She walked in, and I was literally like ‘I cannot believe that someone I’ve written has just walked in the room,’” remembers Hudson. “She’s just got this lioness energy, she’s really funny and determined, and she’s very in her body, and that’s exactly what Molly is like.” 

Pardee also put out a call out through Somali community groups, building on relationships established while working on Rocks, and found first time actor Idil Ahmed for the role of Amina. A chemistry read between Sterling and Ahmed sealed the deal. “It was fireworks. They giggled together like they were 17,” says Hudson. “We just knew it was them, especially when we did this improvisation and they put on [So Solid Crew’s] ‘21 Seconds’ and started rapping away!” 

That chemistry is also apparent on screen, in joyous scenes in which the two friends dance, or an almost screwball sequence in which Molly helps Amina confront her former landlord. This central friendship is essential to retaining the film’s sense of hope, a beacon of optimistic, mischievous subversion in the face of often dehumanising circumstances.

As a self-taught director who never went to film school, Hudson doesn’t subscribe to the rigid hierarchies common to many film sets, which can be alienating to outsiders or newcomers. Given her own personal experience of homelessness, Hudson was sensitive to the potential risks of working with non-professional performers who might find certain scenes intense. To make her set as safe as possible, Hudson turned to a “trauma-informed” practice which she had first developed while co-directing a documentary about Holloway prison. Therapeutic space was made available on set, and every day the shoot would begin and end with a guided meditation. 

Part of the reason why Hudson was able to create an open atmosphere on set, and to tap into that collective energy, is because of Lollipop’s unusual authenticity. This is a working-class story, told by a majority working-class cast and crew. Given the British film industry’s issues with class representation, this positionality imbues Lollipop with an unusual charge. 

“I  do think there’s a magic that comes from when you’ve lived something; you can see things that people don’t see, you feel things that people don’t,” says Hudson. “A lot of stories are told about working-class people that you can really feel come from the outside in. They’re written with a sentimentality or a romanticism that doesn’t really get to the heart of what that experience is like. It’s not easy, but it’s also full of so much joy, so much laughter. Particularly, I guess, because Lollipop is a reflection of the cockney culture that I grew up in, it’s got this honesty.” 

Despite her own rapid ascent, Hudson is keenly aware of the difficulty of navigating the industry without a safety net. “When I was writing Lollipop, I had support from the BBC, but before that I was working in a pub, and there’s been many times where I’ve had no money at all,” says Hudson. “There’s a lot of ways that we could really invest in working-class storytellers from a structural perspective. I’ve seen so much box ticking.” 

Nevertheless, although she is aware that her path was not necessarily typical, Hudson still hopes her story might inspire others. “Sometimes you don’t need to have gone to a film school. You don’t have to wait for someone to tell you that you’re good in order to just tell your story. There are ways in which we can really just follow our heart. We don’t have to wait for permission.”

Lollipop, backed by the BFI Filmmaking Fund with National Lottery funding, is in cinemas from 13 June 2025.