Distant Voices, Still Lives

Terence Davies's Distant Voices, Still Lives won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 1988 and the Golden Leopard at Locarno the same year. It is autobiographical, drawn from the life of Davies's own working-class Liverpool family in the late 1940s and 1950s, and it was made in two parts: he began shooting Distant Voices in 1985 and Still Lives three years later. The two halves were released together as a single feature, arranged in alternating chapters around a wedding, a christening and a funeral.

Its subject is a Catholic Liverpool family, a mother, three children and the violent father played by Pete Postlethwaite, across the years between the end of the Second World War and the dawn of the 1960s. Freda Dowie plays the mother, and Angela Walsh, Dean Williams and Lorraine Ashbourne play the adult children; Postlethwaite plays the father across both halves, in the role that made his international reputation. The film moves by association, with no regard for chronology, and it is organised around the songs the family sings together at the pub piano.

William Diver photographs working-class Liverpool interiors (the kitchen, the bathroom, the front room) in a way that has shaped a generation of British autobiographical cinema, from Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay to Davies's own later The Long Day Closes. Its form, a memoir told through music, is one of the most distinctive things British cinema produced in the late 1980s, and it sits permanently in the upper tier of the BFI's polls of British film.