Barnard, 57, grew up in “the middle of nowhere”, about 10 miles from Bradford. Her father, John Barnard, is a Keats scholar, now married to the acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee. Her mother Kate, an artist and singer, left the family for the jazz musician Mike Westbrook when Barnard was eight years old. She and her two siblings were brought up by their father. The separation was “painful”, but now she says she considers herself lucky to have four great parents. Her love affair with film began at the age of 14 when she watched Mick Jagger in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s acid trip of a movie, Performance. It was on TV late at night, and she viewed it on a black-and-white portable in her bedroom with the volume turned down. What amazed her was its ability to mess with her head. “Here’s this real rock star pretending to be one, whose sort-of girlfriend is also in the film in this crazy threesome. There was something about the real and the fictional that was really fascinating. It blew my tiny mind.” After school, Barnard went on to art college in Leeds and Newcastle upon Tyne, where she initially drew and painted. Then she started to work with cameras, filming the images she created. Barnard moved to London, worked at MTV creating motion graphics, made experimental shorts films and taught film studies at Maidstone College of Art. In 2001, she and her then partner, the artist Adam Chodzko, had their first child (they have two boys aged 21 and 17, and co-parent) and moved to Kent because they couldn’t afford a place in London. Barnard then started teaching film at the University of Kent. She was as fascinated by theory as practice, and wondered how she could weave the two together. She was still obsessed with the same thing that had struck her when first watching Performance – representations of reality, particularly in documentaries that claim to tell the objective truth. As far as Barnard was concerned, that simply doesn’t exist; truth and reality are dictated by what film-makers allow us to see.

Clio is a writer and director of feature films and documentaries. She won widespread critical acclaim and multiple awards for her debut, The Arbor, an experimental documentary about Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. In 2013 she brought her signature style to a modern day re-telling of The Selfish Giant, which premiered in the Director’s Fortnight section of the Cannes film festival. Recently, her third feature-length film, Dark River, was released to similar praise.