Festival, which begins on Wednesday, is screening bounty of films focused on motherhood and its challenges

When she was 38, Victoria Mapplebeck found herself single, pregnant and broke. She had to quit her job as a TV director because the long hours were impossible for a lone parent, but she missed filming. So she turned the camera on her own life instead, and began filming her son Jim as he grew up.

“I first began documenting our lives with my old DVCAM before shooting almost daily on five generations of smartphones,” Mapplebeck said. “I recorded hundreds of hours of footage over the course of 20 years, including each twist and turn in Jim’s life, from the thumbs up he gave me during my first scan, to his first day at college.”