 A film in three minutes, distant voices, still lives. Terence Davis is arguably the best living director in British cinema. His work is a combination of biography and fantasy revealing to us the inner depths of his turbulent upbringing in working-class Liverpool with a visual style and editing approach like no other. His 1988 film Distant Voices Still Lives is the second chapter in his biographical film trilogy and the film itself is actually a joining of two shorter films shot over a period of two years. The end result is a touching portrayal of a close-knit family growing up throughout 1940s and 50s Britain. Unlike most period dramas, the structure of the film is unraveled to us in an unconventional way, revealing intimate portraits of each member of the family as we see them develop and grow. The first part, Distant Voices, follows the struggles each character endures at the hands of a horrifically abusive father, played magnificently by Pete Possilfwate. The father figure is a source of terror to the family and yet like with all people, his relationship with his wife and children is complicated, allowing for moments of levity and joy. But such moments like so many iconic images throughout the film are fleeting and it's not long before we're taken straight back to the darker memories the director has of his own abusive father. The second part, Still Lives, is free of the tyranny Possilfwate's character inflicted but instead there's a deep sense of melancholy surrounding the world that Davis has constructed. We see relationships become frayed, happy marriages, communal singing at the local pub, the entire gamut of day-to-day activities ordinary people once did. Although the story is set in Liverpool, Davis never allows for any wide shots of terraced houses with the mills of heavy industry next to the mercy lighting up the sky. Instead, the world these characters inhabit feels like it could be anywhere in Britain, with the specific time and place uncertain. This style creates a feeling of other worldliness, as if we're being asked to enter the lives of these people much like when we look at old photographs of forgotten faces. He keeps the camera close to the actors with minimal camera movement. When the camera does move, the sense of time fading away is palpable, giving us some of the film's most beautiful shots. The way in which scenes slowly blend into one another helps to emphasise how much of the film appears almost like a memory, as if a personal yearning for nostalgia had encompassed the film's world and the characters in it. The many moments where we see the family and friends singing in the pub are stark reminders of how different Britain was as a country, and they provide some of the warmest encounters we as the audience have with them. The use of songs and music is heavy and visually presented with wondrous effect, capturing the true sense of community that a Britain of the past once had. On this theme on the relationship of music and imagery, Davis has said, I do think that film is closest of all to music. Notes and chords on their own don't mean anything. They only mean something when you juxtapose them with something else. That juxtaposition is Davis' greatest strength throughout the film, leaving us as the viewer haunted by the power of the director's memory and the images he has chosen to best represent it.