Terence Davies’ fractured chronicle of the life of a working-class family in 1940s and ’50s Liverpool is an award-winning British cinema classic. Drawing on his own childhood, he turns his film on the pivot of a brutal patriarch’s death and his daughter’s subsequent marriage, so splitting it into two episodes. The first, Distant Voices, is a set of difficult memories of childhood fear and wartime suffering that drift in and out of the wedding day, while its companion, Still Lives, portrays the life of a happier widow, her two daughters, and her son.
Terence Davies / UK/West Germany 1988 / 1h24m / 15 – Contains scenes of domestic violence. / Cast: Freda Dowie, Dean Williams, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh, Lorraine Ashbourne, Sally Davies.