Director
Terence Davies

Performers
Robert Tucker (child) : Phillip Mawdsley
Robert Tucker (middle age) : Terry O'Sullivan
Robert Tucker (old age) Wilfrid Brambell
Robert's mother : Sheila Raynor

An apprentice work that took Davies nearly a decade to complete, the critically acclaimed Trilogy foreshadows many of the director's ongoing concerns. It contains flashes of his singular form of visual storytelling, subtle use of music, and wry wit. Davies's film is divided into three segments entitled Children (1976); Madonna and Child (1980); and Death and Transfiguration (1983).

The film constructs a composite portrait of Robert Tucker, who like Davies comes from an impoverished Liverpool Catholic family. In the first film, bullied at home and victimised at school, Tucker's only respite comes from the death of his abusive father. Moving from childhood through middle age, Madonna and Child focuses on his homosexuality and the crippling effects of his fear of condemnation by the church. it is a riveting drama on personal conflict. The concluding Death and Transfiguration shifts inevitably to Tucker's waning days in a geriatric ward, looking back over his life and coming to terms with his emotions and memories, where he imagines the night nurse's flashlight as heaven-sent illumination.