Terence Davies' three short films, made over a period of nine years, tell the harrowing story of one man, Robert Tucker of Liverpool, a Roman Catholic and homosexual. Children (1974-76, 46 mins) deals with his unhappy, repressed childhood in the British 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 sexual adventure. In Death and Transfiguration (1983, 25 mins) past and present merge as Tucker is redeemed by the only person he ever loved. David Thomson wrote for the San Francisco International Film Festival '84, "Lacerating but ecstatic in tone, The Terence Davies Trilogy is one of the most imaginative confessional statements in film of the last ten years...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 Bresson and Graham Greene at times, so it comes close to the thrilled nervousness of Gerard Manley Hopkins." Davies' most recent film is Distant Voices, Still Lives.