Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies

The trailer for the BFI’s upcoming Terence Davies season, a complete retrospective of the director’s work that runs 20 October-30 November.

Davies’ cinema is one of memory, longing and tragedy, profoundly personal but universal in its themes: the suffocation of love, the cruelty of faith, the temptations of the flesh and the constant shadow of death. Yet his films are also alive with the songs and cinema that he adored. From his deeply autobiographical trilogy, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes to his luscious interpretations of Edith Wharton, Terrence Rattigan and the lives of Emily Dickinson and Siegfried Sassoon, Davies brought a poetic intensity to his work, layering sound, silence, portrait, landscape and music to breathtaking, often unbearably moving effect.

Two years on from his death, this season presents a complete journey through Davies’ body of work, and a selection of his personal archives that are housed at Edge Hill University. It’s a celebration of his heroism and quiet radicalism, tracing the evolution of an artist who gave cinema his soul.

BFI