Distant Voices, Still Lives

Distant Voices, Still Lives centres on a working-class family in Liverpool during the 1940s and 1950s. At Eileen's wedding, her siblings Maisie and Tony and their mother come together for a happy occasion, but memories of the past intrude. Their father, an alcoholic prone to violent outbursts, abused his wife and left deep scars on his children, who grew into adults still searching for affection they never received at home.

Terence Davies wrote and directed the film, an impressionistic portrait drawn from his own family history and structured as a series of remembered moments set to period songs. It followed his earlier autobiographical trilogy and sits before The Deep Blue Sea, Sunset Song and Benediction in his filmography. Freda Dowie plays the mother and Pete Postlethwaite the father, with Angela Walsh as Eileen, Lorraine Ashbourne as Maisie and Dean Williams as Tony among a credited cast of thirty-one. Jennifer Howarth produced.

A British and German co-production, the film was released in November 1988 and runs eighty-four minutes. It holds a critics' rating of 8.3 out of 10 from forty-one reviews, higher than its audience scores of 7.4 on IMDb from around 5,700 votes and 6.9 on TMDB from far fewer. That gap suggests strong approval from reviewers alongside more measured responses from general viewers.