A Way of Life 2004

Leigh-Anne Williams [Stephanie James] is a late-teen living in a deprived part of South Wales, already scarred by her mother’s suicide in childhood and years of abuse from her father. She and her family worry about their younger sister, who is in her early teens, while the father has remarried their mother’s sister and they have a much younger daughter together.

She has a baby daughter Rebecca [Eli Williams] who is less than a year old, and Leigh-Anne is fiercely protective of her. The father is in prison, but his mother remains in contact with Leigh-Anne and suggests that Rebecca would be better off in her care.

Leigh-Anne has made several significant enemies in her local area, a hard, poverty-stricken corner of South Wales. She is locked in constant confrontations with her Turkish Muslim neighbour Hassan Osman [Oliver Haden], and in her desperate bid to support her baby she commits shocking acts to raise money. She tricks a much older man out of £30 by pretending to be a pimp, then enlists a younger girl to have sex with the man, an act that goes largely unseen by the police but is witnessed by Hassan’s daughter Julie [Sara Gregory].

Three people who remain close to Leigh-Anne are her younger brother Gavin Williams [Nathan Jones] and Gavin’s friends Robbie Matthews [Gary Sheppeard] and Stephen Rajan [Dean Wong]. Yet all three are entangled in crime and anti-social behavior, and Leigh-Anne often finds herself either participating or standing by as events unfold. A social worker regularly visits Leigh-Anne, and she fears Rebecca could be removed from her care. The moment Leigh-Anne sees the social worker speaking with Hassan Osman, she worries that Osman is trying to get Rebecca taken into care by the local authority.

One day at a library, Leigh-Anne, Gavin, Robbie and Stephen cross paths with Hassan Osman and his daughter Julie [Sara Gregory], who has recently been in a relationship with Gavin. An argument escalates into a street fight in which the three boys brutally attack Osman while Leigh-Anne watches.

Back at home, the police come to question Leigh-Anne about the attack, and she accompanies them as her friends are led away, Robbie’s jumper stained with blood from the confrontation. The final moments show Leigh-Anne crying in police custody after Rebecca is handed over to Social Services. Her social worker explains that nobody intended to remove the baby, and that Osman had been consulting about his own daughter Julie’s issues. Julie then tells the police that she is pregnant with Gavin’s baby.