The British Film Institute in London is currently celebrating what would have been the 80th birthday of TERENCE DAVIES, who was lauded as one of its greatest, most uncompromising cinematic artists.  In the 1970s he wrote/directed Children,  then Madonna and Child, which he followed with Death and Transfiguration. These three films comprise The Terence Davies Trilogy, which put him on the cinematic map as one of the most original British film-makers of the late 20th century.

He would go on to make aesthetically revelatory autobiographical masterworks Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, which transformed his memories of growing up in working-class Liverpool into nonlinear dreams that collapsed past and present, to his brilliant adaptations of classic novels (The House of Mirth, Sunset Song) to his galvanizing portrayals of poets Emily Dickinson and Siegfried Sassoon.  Through his work, he dealt with some of his complicated emotions: of wrestling with faith, with his homosexuality.  He was an openly gay who chose to be celibate for almost his entire life

At the seme tine in NY there  will be a Terence Davies Retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image

Terence Davies: Time Present and Time Past will include Davies’ nine features, many of which are in rare film prints, as well as his trilogy of early short films and other rarely screened shorts. Cynthia Nixon, who portrayed Emily Dickinson in “A Quiet Passion,” will be in attendance for the September 18 screening. The opening night reception will also be celebrating the reissue of Davies’ 1984 novel “Hallelujah Now,” published by Film Desk Books. Highlights additionally range from “The House of Mirth,” “The Deep Blue Sea,” and “Benediction” screenings, as well as the autobiographical “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes.”