Balls takes as its starting point Heathcliff, the foundling character central to Wuthering Heights, and explores links between the Foundling Hospital story and the much-loved novel by Brontë. Cole’s film is inspired by two separate but intertwined stories; the real lives of desperate women and the babies they gave up to the care of the Foundling Hospital, which are meticulously documented in the Hospital’s archives; and Heathcliff, the foundling antihero in Wuthering Heights. Set in modern day Liverpool, the film shines a light on how the lives of women, celebrated or unknown, were so circumscribed by society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and considers the extent to which progress has been made.

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