When my feature documentary Motherboard was released, I was in my late 50s. I had filmed it over 20 years, on five generations of smartphones, documenting the pain, joy and comedy of raising my son Jim alone.

When I became pregnant at 38, I found myself single and broke. I was working long hours as a freelance TV and film director. Jim’s father made it clear he did not want to be involved. I didn’t want my son to have two absent parents, so I quit my job overnight. Like many women in the creative industries, I paid a heavy motherhood penalty. It was more than 12 years before I got back to making films.

For five years I tried to raise finance for Motherboard through the usual markets. I eventually raised £60,000 from Arte, the Association for European Television, to begin editing Motherboard, only to lose it when we could not find match funding. The film that changed everything for me was Tangerine, which was famously shot on an iPhone 5 in 2014. Its energy and immediacy blew me away.

Around the same time, I came across an interview with director Ava DuVernay, the first black woman to win the best director prize for her film Middle of Nowhere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. Her advice to fellow filmmakers was to stop waiting for the right agent, financier or producer to “discover” you. “There’s no one coming … You have to do it yourself.”

And so my DIY filmmaking career began. I wanted to make a film about solo parenting in all its messiness, the highs, but also the........

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