From left Sol Papadopoulos, Terence Davies, Roy Boulter. Photo by Mark McNulty

Director

Terence Davies is one of the most respected filmmakers in cinema today. His work has been honoured by awards from around the world. His dark and powerful trilogy, all set in Liverpool, Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) develops powerful themes of forbidden sexuality, Catholicism, violence, loss, death and childhood. But it is in his 1988 film Distant Voices, Still Lives, again drawing on his Liverpool roots, that these become exquisitely blended with a gentle warmth and humour and a transcendent sense of hope beyond the miseries of difficult daily life. It is also here that the auteur finds a particularly unique visual style – tableaux of characters that come slowly to life, the sense of the outsider observing through windows which can be snowy, misted or distant and an exquisite sepia palette, painted in places with muted pastels. This visual style combines with his themes and his stories to give him a very original voice.

Later films, like The Long Day Closes, (1992) is also set in Liverpool, and the beautiful and heart breaking House of Mirth (2000) have also been garnered with awards.

Of Time and The City revisits the territory of his earlier narrative films. A narrative poem which for the sake of genre may be called a documentary, Terence says he treated it as a fiction film although he acknowledges that it is much more factual. In comparing it with his narrative work he says that “the stylistic features remain the same”. But he recognises that recurrent themes and motifs run through all the work of other directors and he suspects that the same may well be true of him.