Ceri Walker wins third Recovery Street Film Festival

Huge congratulations to Nacoa ambassador Ceri Walker who last week won The Recovery Street Film Festival for the third time. This time with her her incredibly moving film ‘Understanding the Child in Me’.

The film is a poetic whirlwind of memory and reflection. Ceri Walker opens up her scrapbooks to speak compassionately to her childhood self. An animated short film delving into the deep impacts of growing up with a parent who drinks too much.

This is Ceri Walker’s long-awaited return to her ‘Understanding’ series of short films. Through objects, scraps and old photographs, she navigates painful memories of her mum. Ceri needs to break the cycle for her own children: ‘I love you Mum. But this ends with me.’

‘Somewhere in me still felt scared’

Ceri says of the film: ‘I always connected my current feelings with my childhood. I knew that being the child of an alcoholic had shaped me, but no matter how much I talked about it, somewhere in me still felt scared, still made excuses for Mum, and no matter how much I told you otherwise—I still felt it was all my fault, I always felt it in my body too, with anxiety rearing its head regularly.

‘Over the last year I have had therapy exploring my inner child, and now I can see things from a very different perspective… I finally have my own back, I am able to see that what I went through as a little girl simply shouldn’t have happened, I should have been kept safe, and loved unconditionally.

‘It isn’t that I don’t feel empathy for Mum anymore, or understand how difficult addiction is, its just that I see that my experience was still traumatic, regardless of why, and I was never to blame, no child is ever to blame! I hope other COAs see this, and that it helps them to feel a kindness towards themselves they may not have felt before.’