Fireworks Logo

Trailers...

  • Acting Like Women
  • Meeting Marsha
  • Città dei Vivi (La)
  • Sweet Nothing
  • In This Moment
  • Don't
  • Long Marathon (A)
  • Until You're Alone
  • Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks
  • Year in London (A)
  • Youri
  • Wrong Girls (The)
  • Sweet Milk Lake
  • Shards (The)
  • Jamaal: Love Coded
  • Harbinger
  • Filter
  • Children of Blood and Bone
  • Shumei: The Living Legacy of Kabuki
  • I'm Not You
  • Phillip Philadelphia
  • I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming
  • Wolf Cat Fever
  • Broken Beak
  • Nacio Simon
  • Love on a Tightrope
  • Faces of Death
  • Our Effed Up World
  • Incomer (The)
  • Prosecution
  • Unknown (The)
  • Czech Girl
  • Man Will Burn (The)
  • Five-Star Weekend (The)
  • No Rest for the Wicked
  • Dear Future Self
  • Sea of Glass
  • San Francisco Rising
  • All Sides of the Bed
  • We're Nothing at All

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Country: UK | West Germany, Language: English, 85 mins

  • Director: Terence Davies
  • Writer: Terence Davies
  • Producer: Jennifer Howarth; Colin MacCabe

CGiii Comment

In a similar vein to A Long Day Closes...

Watch and be transported...

Davies does what he does and, truly, it is a beautiful thing to experience.


Trailer...

The(ir) Blurb...

The second film in Terence Davies's autobiographical series ('Trilogy', 'The Long Day Closes') is an impressionistic view of a working-class family in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool, based on Davies's own family. The first part, 'Distant Voices', opens with grown siblings Eileen (Angela Walsh), Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne) and Tony (Dean Williams), and their mother (Freda Dowie) arranged in mourning clothes before the photograph of their smiling father (Pete Postlethwaite). Soon after, the family poses in a similar tableau, but for a happier occasion - Eileen's wedding. While relatives sing at her reception, Eileen hysterically grieves for her dad, and recalls happy times of her youth. Tony and Maisie's memories, however, are more troubled. Davies intermingles and contrasts scenes like the family peacefully lighting candles in church with the brutal man beating his wife and terrorizing his young children.

Cast & Characters

Lorraine Ashbourne as Maisie;
Jean Boht as Aunty Nell;
Carl Chase as Uncle Ted;
Chris Darwin as Red;
Sally Davies as Eileen as a child;
Frances Dell as Margie;
Freda Dowie as Mother;
Anne Dyson as Granny;
Susan Flanagan as Maisie as a child;
Marie Jelliman;
Debi Jones as Micky;
Matthew Long as Mr. Spaull;
Vincent Maguire as George;
Antonia Mallen as Rose;
Pete Postlethwaite as Father