The Deep Blue Sea

The daughter of a Scottish farmer comes of age in the early 1900s.

Set in Kensington, a working-class district of Liverpool, England in mid-1950s, this is the story of eleven-year-old Bud, a sad and lonely boy. With cinema as his main source of solace, he haunts the local 'picture-house'. All the while, his family looms large in our peripheral vision as do the menacing bullies of his school, but Bud is the centre of attention both from the camera's angle and from his doting family.

Christine looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train ride, Christine finds herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege that she had never imagined. But Christine’s aunt drops her as abruptly as she picked her up, and soon the young woman is back at the provincial post office, consumed with disappointment and bitterness. Then she meets Ferdinand, a wounded but eloquent war veteran who is able to give voice to the disaffection of his generation. Christine’s and Ferdinand’s lives spiral downward, before Ferdinand comes up with a plan which will be either their salvation or their doom.

The second part of Terence Davies' trilogy revolving around Liverpudlian Robert Tucker, focusing on the character's efforts in middle-age to come to terms with his homosexuality.

A woman risks losing her chance of happiness with the only man she has ever loved.

These three semi-autobiographical short films by Terence Davies follow the journey of Robert Tucker, first seen as a hangdog child in "Children", then as a hollow-eyed middle-aged man in "Madonna and Child", and finally as a decrepit old man in "Death and Transfiguration". Dreamlike and profoundly moving.

"Of Time and The City" is both a love song and a eulogy to the director's birthplace of Liverpool, England. It is also a response to memory, reflection and the experience of losing a sense of place as the skyline changes and time takes it toll. The visual content of the film consists largely of archival clips of Liverpool from the 1940s to the 1960s, their nostalgic charm darkened by accompanying music and by the counterpoint of Davies’ dry, at times dyspeptic, voice-over narration. His voice thickens with emotion as he recalls the delights of juvenile movie-going or the ritual of a holiday trip to New Brighton, across the River Mersey, and hardens with contempt when he turns his gaze on the hoopla surrounding Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953.

The story of American poet Emily Dickinson from her early days as a young schoolgirl to her later years as a reclusive, unrecognized artist.

A biopic about soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), who was decorated for bravery on the Western Front, and is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about the First World War, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirised generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war.

The second film in Terence Davies's autobiographical series (along with "Trilogy" and "The Long Day Closes") is an impressionistic view of a working-class family in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool, based on Davies's own family. Through a series of exquisite tableaux Davies creates a deeply affecting photo album of a troubled family wrestling with the complexity of love.