Victoria Mapplebeck

Victoria Mapplebeck is a BAFTA award winning artist and film director. She is also Professor of Digital Arts in Media Arts.  Victoria’s films explore autobiographical stories which ask universal questions about our relationship with technology, parenting, health and wellbeing.

For the last decade, Victoria has been shooting continuously with smartphones. She is passionate about the innovation, intimacy and accessibility of smartphone filmmaking. In 2015, she wrote, filmed and directed '160 Characters' a smartphone short for Film London. Shot entirely on an iPhone 6, '160 Characters' brings to life the secrets buried in a vintage Nokia. When the film launched online it received a Vimeo Staff pick.

In 2017, Victoria wrote, filmed and directed 'Missed Call'. ‘Missed Call’ explores the difficult decision to reconnect with her son Jim's absent  father. It begins with the last message he sent in 2006 and ends with the first call to him over a decade later.

‘Missed Call’ won  Best Short Form Programme at the 2019 BAFTAs and Best Documentary Short at The 2019 Broadcast Digital Awards. Commissioned by Real Stories with an online audience of 5.59 million viewers, Missed Call was the first smartphone short to win an academy award.

Victoria recently completed  ‘Motherboard’ a smartphone feature documentary, filmed over 20 years which charts the rollercoaster of raising her son Jim alone. Victoria first began documenting their lives with her old DVCAM before shooting almost daily on five generations of smartphones, from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 15. She recorded hundreds of hours of footage, capturing each twist and turn in Jim’s life, from the thumbs-up he gave her during her first scan, to his first day at college. 

Motherboard documents a lifetime of parenting, capturing the love, comedy and drama of solo motherhood in all its unfiltered glory. It received funding from OKRE and Women in Film and TV and was bought by Autlook Film Sales. It had its world premiere at CPH:Dox in Copenhagen, where it received a four star review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Motherboard had its UK premiere at London Film festival  in 2024 and later that year, Victoria won The Women in Film and TV Director Award for her work on Motherboard. This award recognises outstanding achievement by a woman director in film, TV or digital media within the last two years. 

Following an international festival run in Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the Czech Republic, Motherboard had its cinema release in summer 2025 with Tull Stories, playing in over 70 cinemas in the UK and Ireland. It received extensive media coverage .It has also received a 2025 Grierson nomination for Best Cinema Documentary and nominations for Best Feature Documentary, Best Debut Director and The Raindance Maverick Award at the 2025 BIFA awards. 

Victoria is passionate about new modes of documentary storytelling. Over the last three decades she has experimented with new technologies and new platforms to build new audiences. In 2016, in partnership with the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art,  Victoria wrote, directed and curated TEXT ME - An award winning interactive arts project exploring how audiences could collect, curate and share stories from their digital past. As part of this six week exhibition, gallery visitors created their own artworks, inspired by a story or secret buried in their mobile phone. TEXT ME won The Pixel Lab Prize and The Merging Media Prize for Best European Cross platform Project. It was also selected for University UK’s 20 Ideas for Life, one of 20 national research projects, which celebrated ‘The impact universities have on everyday lives in the UK and beyond, including the value and importance of their world leading research’.

Victoria’s work has explored intimacy, narrative and presence design in spatial storytelling.  In 2019, she was awarded an EPSRC Immersive Documentary Encounters Commission, to create a VR project which told the story of her breast cancer (as patient and film-maker) . This multi platform project also includes a 30 minute smartphone short film which premiered on The Guardian website in 2019

The Waiting Room VR project premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival , won IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling and was also featured on BBC Click . It was also selected for Forbe’s Top 50 XR experiences of 2019 and chosen by MIT as one of ‘The Best of International 360 Cinema in VR’ projects over the last decade. The Waiting Room VR is archived on the MIT Docubase site, a curated platform, ‘of the people, projects, and technologies transforming documentary in the digital age’. 

In 2021 Victoria wrote and directed, 'Testing Times' an immersive audio experience which features over 50 hours of phone calls and voicemails, with friends, family and doctors, capturing the challenges of multiple lockdowns. 'Testing Times' premiered at IDFA in 2021. In Spring 2022 it was showcased at The True/False Arts Festival in Ohio and in 2023, it was part of a BFI Expanded showcase celebrating the work of women and non binary directors working in XR. 

For the last 19 years, Victoria  has taught film practice to many undergrad and postgrad students in Media Arts. She is passionate about developing and delivering engaging and inclusive forms of teaching and learning, which encourage and inspire students to achieve excellence in creative filmmaking,  immersive media and their future careers in the creative industries.

Victoria is the Equality Champion in Media Arts, and committed to shaping a new generation of Media professionals who will help to create a more inclusive and diverse industry. Victoria’s article for The Conversation exploring the lack of gender parity in Film and TV, had 16,000 online views and has been widely shared and debated by our students.

In 2021 Victoria co founded and co curated 'SMart, The London International Smartphone Film Festival', with director and former Channel 4 commissioner Adam Gee.   SMart received 130 entries from all over the world and was also a showcase for the Royal Holloway student films which were nominated. Our jury members included Adrian Dunbar (Line of Duty), Alex Lawther (End of the F**cking World), Sophie Fiennes (Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami), Adil Ray (Citizen Khan) and Sally Lindsay (Coronation St and Scott and Bailey).

Victoria has been invited to sit on many international Film and Immersive Festival juries including the RTS, WFTV and the Griersons.

Her creative research has achieved  significant external impact in international press and media including BBC News, C5 News, Sky News , ITV News, BBC Click, The Economist, The Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Observer, Radio 4, Sight and Sound, Amazon Studios, Screen Daily, Voices of VR, The New World, Bertha Dochouse and Broadcast magazine. Victoria has also written many features on her practice research for The Huffington Post ,Wired magazine and The Conversation.  

Victoria is also a BAFTA member 

Films, articles and more info at the link below:

https://victoriamapplebeck.com

https://motherboardfilm.com

email:[email protected]