Ray & Liz
Renowned photographer Richard Billingham makes his feature-film debut with this intricate family portrait, inspired in part by his own memories and shot on stunning 16mm.
Billingham is best known for a series of striking photographs depicting his family in their council flat outside Birmingham during the Thatcher era. For his feature debut, Billingham revisits the figures of his earlier photographs – His alcoholic father Ray; his obese, tattooed mother Liz; and his younger brother Jason – with a series of everyday rituals that defy chronology, partly inspired by the artist’s own teenage memories.
Sharing the same candid, cramped spaces as the photographs, the film is stunningly shot on 16mm. While the film’s characters are exquisitely, lovingly drawn, exuding a wide and subtle range of emotion, RAY & LIZ accrues by strength of its indelible detail: the sublime light streaming through bottles of homemade brew; the lace curtains, paisley carpets, and ornate wallpaper that inform a period décor of paradoxical beauty and tackiness. By turns tremendously sad, shocking, hilarious, and humanist, Billingham’s film is as much about desperation and poverty as it is about memory, resistance, and small moments of grace. (source: www.tiff.net)