GB
1988
1hr 25mins
Dir: Terence Davies
Starring: Freda Dowie and Pete Postlethwaite
Life for a Liverpool working class family during the 1940’s and ’50s
This period drama was originally made for television and was inspired by Terence Davies’ family memories of growing up in a working-class family in Liverpool during the 1940’s. It does in fact consist of two films, Distant Voices and Still Lives, which were made two years apart with the same crew. Whilst Distant Voices portrays the main characters growing up in Britain in the 1940’s during World War II, Still Lives portrays them as grown-ups in the early 1950’s after the war. The hard-hitting drama doesn’t always make for easy viewing, but it eases towards a brighter future and has been described as ‘Britain’s forgotten cinematic masterpiece’. There are some brief scenes depicting railway journeys that appear in Distant Voices, with shots onboard trains that were filmed at the Didcot Railway Centre.
