Distant Voices, Still Lives

Trailer

Directed by Terence Davies

United Kingdom, 1988

Drama

Synopsis

Set in 1940s England, Distant Voices, Still Lives is a compassionate look at a radically dysfunctional family.

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Distant Voices, Still Lives Directed by Terence Davies

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Awards & Festivals

Cannes Film Festival

1988 | Winner: FIPRESCI Prize (Directors' Fortnight)

Sundance Film Festival

1992

Locarno International Film Festival

1988 | Winner: Golden Leopard

Independent Spirit Awards

1990 | Nominee: Best Foreign Film

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Critics reviews

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[The] disjunctive stops and starts recur across Davies’s movie, whose look-back form — all elegiacally drifting camera movements and belted-out bar songs — endures as a grand cinematic anomaly.

Danny King

August 28, 2018

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Davies, not a character in this film, was only six-years-old when his father died, yet his presence as a spectator is felt in the film’s formal elements. We are always aware of the camera’s presence here. In Distant Voices we see this to powerful effect in the glorious tableau composition of the family posed as if for a photo on Eileen’s wedding day. Slowness and stillness make us aware of the father’s physical absence and his detached presence in a photo on the wall behind them.

Joanna Di Mattia

September 20, 2017

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A stunner of a first feature, this episodic chronicle of working-class life in postwar Liverpool was a personal and public exorcism for Davies, marked by his enduring compassion… With devotional simplicity and heartbreaking tenderness, its virtuoso set pieces of family ceremony and quotidian ritual lay bare a generation’s worth of compromises and betrayals. A masterpiece of the most exalted plane.

Eli Goldfarb

May 04, 2016

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What are people saying?

Ingrid Bergman's rating of the film Distant Voices, Still Lives
Ingrid Bergman

This is a very moving and personal look at a family that would have been too harrowing to watch if it were not for the genuine compassion of Terence Davies for the characters and his brilliant and innovative use of the musical score.The score provides a soft focus lens for the brutality of the patriarch of the family and the ongoing consequences in addition to an accurate timeframe for the unfolding drama.
October 15, 2012 12:29
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comeandsee's rating of the film Distant Voices, Still Lives
comeandsee

I feel this film was excellent in parts and at others got the tone badly wrong. the first section was almost relentless in the sorrow it presented and this sort of overwhelmed me at the time. the performances were excellent and some of the framing was masterly. the need for songs every five seconds also seemed a bit too contrived. compared to a similar format of autobiography in Tarkovsky, it lacks somewhat.
January 24, 2019 16:21
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Kamran's rating of the film Distant Voices, Still Lives
Kamran

My experience with Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives, and how it became a 100/100 film: http://bit.ly/22EeS65
June 04, 2016 18:07
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Lynch/Fellini's rating of the film Distant Voices, Still Lives
Lynch/Fellini

What an excellent film from Terrence Davies, featuring some of the best framing I have ever seen! This is my first of Davies' oeuvre, but certainly not my last!
April 21, 2014 05:07
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smndvdcl's rating of the film Distant Voices, Still Lives
smndvdcl

Terence Davies' magnum opus - poetic realism that highlights the harrowing plight of domestic subjugation.
February 12, 2017 19:38
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P D Dawson's rating of the film Distant Voices, Still Lives
P D Dawson

A powerful return to the past through characters that sing and are merry, but beneath the surface there is unhappiness and melancholy. An open front door features early in the film and we see through it as if this were the lens through which we see this family, from deaths to marriages, all pass through this door and we watch on looking into the past. Brilliant film that feels so real we feel like voyeurs looking on.
July 18, 2017 20:57
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nessmj's rating of the film Distant Voices, Still Lives
nessmj

Davies has given us a gift of a musical with an unerring camera documenting an imperfect world. The lack of camera movement gives such a sense of calm as to nearly unnerve us in moments of horror with stories revolving around the nucleus of a patriarchal terror or the same lives in a world without him. We cope with these people through music, one can't help but want to sing with them as we face our own tribulations.
May 03, 2017 20:09
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Andrew Lang's rating of the film Distant Voices, Still Lives
Andrew Lang

One of the greatest British films ever made. Thank you to the BFI for re-mastering it and re-releasing it. It has the atmosphere of the deepest, most personal and most precious memories. A gem.
September 16, 2018 21:25
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