Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

Essential Viewing

UK

Feature Film

Writer/Director: Terence Davies

Cinematographers: William Diver, Patrick Duval

Cast: Freda Dowie, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh, Dean Williams, Lorraine Ashbourne, Debi Jones, Michael Starke, Vincent Maguire, Antonia Mallen

Davies’s sensual, impressionistic magnum opus presents a visually ravishing, gently funny, and decidedly heartbreaking yet surprisingly warm look at the upbringing of his elder siblings in a working class district of Liverpool in the late '40s and early ‘50s, detailing the highs and lows of growing up in a house ruled over by a violently abusive father and a loving if passive mother. Iain.Stott