Terence DAVIES

Terence Davies is one of the most distinctive talents to have emerged from British cinema in the last thirty years. His approach to film-making is the cinematic equivalent of literature's magic realism, in which a vivid recreation of the everyday world is fused with dreams and memories to produce a form of hyper-realism, reflecting both the external world and inner world of the film-maker. Along with directors like Bill DOUGLAS and Lynne RAMSEY, he has pushed the British tradition of social realism into whole new areas.

Born in Liverpool on 10 November 1945, Davies was the youngest of ten children (three of whom did not survive into adulthood) in a working-class, Catholic family. Leaving school at fifteen, he spent the next twelve years as a clerk in a shipping office and then in a firm of accountants. He took up amateur dramatics and joined Coventry Drama School in 1971. His first short film, Children (1976), was made with £8,500 from the BFI Production Board and on the strength of it he gained a place at the National Film School where he completed Madonna and Child (1980). After leaving film school, he made Death and Transfiguration (1983) with funding from the BFI and the Greater London Arts Association. Together these three short films form The Terence Davies Trilogy and were released as a feature under this name in 1984.