Special Screenings 2019

Ray & Liz

Richard Billingham I 2018 I 107'

SYNOPSIS

Based on the memoirs of photographer and director Richard Billingham, the film focuses on his parents Ray and Liz, their relationship and the impact they had on Richard, and his little brother Jason. On the periphery of Birmingham and the margins of society, the Billingham family performs extreme rituals and breaks social taboos with a life determined by factors beyond their control.

BIOGRAPHY

Richard Billingham

RICHARD BILLINGHAM (UK, 1970). In 1997 he was awarded the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize and the following year BBC2 broadcast his first documentary, Fishtank, produced by Artangel and filmmaker Adam Curtis. He exhibited at the 2001 Venice Biennale and was nominated for the Turner Prize, also in 2001. His works are about his own family, animals in zoos around the world and the British landscape.

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Critical text

The fact that Richard Billingham was, before being a filmmaker, a well-known photographer - and not just any photographer: he is among the most prestigious artists in the UK, particularly thanks to the snapshots he took of his dysfunctional family during the 1990s - gives us some clues to his first feature film. Ray & Liz returns to the story of the director’s parents through three episodes that take place in proletarian Birmingham during the Thatcher era. Billingham’s purpose is to capture, with unusual narrative and formal precision, scraps of a time long gone, the few and significant pieces of a larger puzzle, that of the progressive decline of the Billingham family. Ray & Liz, which gives us a different perspective on part of the suburban and grey universe of Alan Clarke, Terence Davies or Mike Leigh, elaborates a map of broken affections in which, in spite of the harshness of the story, a loving and even humorous look ends up picking through. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH

Technical Sheet