Terence Davies: The Long Day Closes (1992)

35mm print (color, sound) 85 min. Britain. Gift of the artist and Three River Films

"Freud writes that the most difficult experience of any man’s life is the death of his father. For Davies, however, that experience was something of a blessing. ‘Between my father dying when I was seven and leaving primary school,’ Davies remembers, ‘those years were just so happy I was almost sick with happiness.’ The film portrays a boy much like Davies—the youngest of ten children in 1950s working-class Liverpool, only seven of whom survived infancy—emerging from a mercilessly dark, violent struggle with a bullying, alcoholic father into the nurturing bliss of life alone with his mother, brothers, and sisters, a life wanting in material comforts but leavened by mirth, song, and Doris Day movies. With a painterly beauty built on exquisitely choreographed camera movements and aged, washed-out color, the film tells a ‘story of paradise, but the story of a paradise that’s already being lost and will only survive as a memory.’" (The Lost Childhood, Press Release)

Screened at MoMA as a part of "Terence Davies: From the Collection", and "Still Moving".