17.12.23, 14:30, The Long Day Closes (1992)

In early October, filmmaker Terence Davies died abruptly after a brief illness. For decades, the British grand master hammered together a small œuvre in which he shaped literary classics as well as his own biography. With the autobiographical The Long Day Closes, he returns to where he ended earlier with Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988): indoors in 1950s Liverpool, under mother's warm wings, during the blissful golden years just after the death of his tyrannical father and before leaving for a steel-hard Catholic boarding school.

The lonely Bud observes his older siblings as they experience the heyday of the fifties in and around the working-class neighbourhoods of the big city; he himself ventures out into smoky cinemas, where he discovers his love for cinema. Lyrical, enveloping and delving deep into the simplicity of things, Davies captures the essence of a small life and in doing so definitively concludes the filming of his personal past. An ideal introduction to the filmmaker on a cold Sunday afternoon like this.

This film will be introduced by media studies lecturer Wiebe Copman.