These three films tell the harrowing story of one man, Robert Tucker of Liverpool. Children (1976, 46 mins) deals with his unhappy, repressed childhood in the British “public school” system (the equivalent of our private schools). Madonna and Child (1980, 30 mins) depicts Tucker as an adult in his thirties, by day the dutiful son and conscientious worker, by night a seeker of homosexual adventures. In Death and Transfiguration (1983, 25 mins), past and present merge as Tucker is redeemed by the only person he ever loved. The Trilogy was featured at the 1984 San Francisco Film Festival, when David Thomson wrote, “Lacerating but ecstatic in tone, The Terence Davies Trilogy is one of the most imaginative confessional statements in film of the last ten years. Yet it is by no means as large or daunting as the title suggests.... All three pictures were photographed by William Diver in black and white which, in Davies' eyes, ‘has the ability to strip bare, to rid the image of all superfluity and to create a beauty that is all the more powerful because of its very starkness.' Moving backwards and forwards in time, torn between the similar appeals of a real mother and icons of the madonna, filled with situations of dread and pain, revelation and consolation, the Trilogy is that uncommon thing, a film about the spirit. Just as it makes us think of Robert Bresson and Graham Greene at times, so it comes close to the thrilled nervousness of Gerard Manley Hopkins.”