Distant Voices, Still Lives

“In memory, everything happens to music.”

At Eileen's wedding in Liverpool, her siblings Maisie and Tony gather with their mother (Freda Dowie), and the day is a happy one that keeps slipping back into memory. The memories bring in their father (Pete Postlethwaite), whose violence at home left all of them looking for a love they never got as children. Terence Davies sets it in the 1940s and early 1950s and lets the songs from pubs and radios carry each scene.