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. The film is autobiographical: Davies had begun shooting Distant Voices in 1985 and Still Lives three years later, drawing on his own working-class Liverpool family's life in the late 1940s and 1950s. The two halves were eventually released as a single feature, structured as alternating chapters around a wedding, a christening and a funeral.

The film follows a Catholic Liverpool family — 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; Angela Walsh, Dean Williams and Lorraine Ashbourne play the adult children; Postlethwaite, in the role that established his international reputation, plays the father across both halves. The film's structure is associative rather than chronological, organised around the songs the family sings together at the pub piano.

William Diver's photography of working-class Liverpool interiors — the kitchen, the bathroom, the front room — produced a register that has shaped a generation of British autobiographical cinema (Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Davies's own later The Long Day Closes). The film's musical-memoir form is widely cited as one of the most distinctive achievements of late-1980s British cinema, and it sits permanently in the upper tier of the BFI's polls of British film.