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Ray And Liz Photo: Courtesy of New York Film Festival

Ray And Liz, 1.45am, Tuesday, Film4

A textbook case of how vital production design can be to creating and sustaining the mood of a movie, Beck Rainford's work on Richard Billingham's film is so intense you can almost smell it. She recreates, alongside Billingham a snapshot of the bleak side of Thatcher's Britain, as he draws on his own childhood and photographic studies of his family to depict a dysfunctional family. Presented as a triptych, we see his alcoholic father Ray (Patrick Romer), in a framing device, elderly and alone after Liz (Deidre Kelly) has left him. The film then flashes back to two more periods in the family's life with the focus falling on Richard's little brother Jason - first seen as a toddler and then as an older child (when he is played by Joshua Millard-Lloyd...

Ray And Liz Photo: Courtesy of New York Film Festival Ray & Liz, 11.20pm, Film4, Monday, April 26

Richard Billingham draws on his own upbringing and his photographic studies of his parents to realise this gritty slice-of-life drama about a dysfunctional family. Presented as a triptych, we see his alcoholic father Ray (Patrick Romer), in a framing device, elderly and alone after Liz (Deidre Kelly) has left him. The film then flashes back to two more periods in the family's life with the focus falling on Richard's little brother Jason - first seen as a toddler and then as an older child, mostly living on pickled beetroot and trying to avoid his parents as much as possible. The strong production design - right down to buzzing flies - captures its points in time perfectly, and if there is a bleakness here, not to mention a heart gut punch to Thatcher's Britain, there...

The first person we meet in “Ray & Liz” is elderly Ray (Patrick Romer). Alone in a tiny room, abandoned by his wife Liz (Deirdre Kelly), he has taken to his bed seemingly permanently, waking only long enough to drink as much as it takes to keep himself drunk. He keeps a photo of himself as a young man with his bride stuck to a mirror next to a religious pamphlet that delivers the only foreshadowing this film feels like giving: a Bible verse instructing children to “obey [their] parents in everything.”

“Ray & Liz,” Richard Billingham’s debut feature, punctuates its main action with visits to this room, with the rest of the quietly downcast story taking place during the 1980s, as Ray and Liz descend into poverty, despair, and alcoholism in a council flat outside of Birmingham, England. Their children — Richard and his younger brother Jason — are along for the ride,...

“Ray & Liz” — the haunted and pungent debut feature by photographer Richard Billingham, who’s been dabbling in the form since the late ’90s — feels like watching someone painstakingly build a rusty time machine that only brings them back to their own rotten past. And to what end?

Billingham’s work has always been lauded for its lack of overt beauty; his most acclaimed pictures find his layabout parents cooped up inside the bleakest council flat in all of Thatcher-era Birmingham, the images striking for their deprivation and self-sufficiency. Rather than mine his home life for manufactured poetry, Billingham shot his family with an anthropological flare, as though he’d smuggled a camera into an animal enclosure that the bourgeois art world had only seen from the outside. (Billingham’s 1998 short “Fishtank” has nothing and everything to do with the similarly named Andrea Arnold film that would follow a few years later.

Turner Prize-nominated artist Richard Billingham turns his hand to filmmaking with an overwhelmingly personal, intricately observed depiction of his troubled upbringing and neglectful parents. This remarkably assured debut feature was born out of Billingham’s single-screen video artwork Ray and his acclaimed 1996 photography book Ray’s a Laugh, which captured his poverty-stricken domestic life with uncompromising honesty. Shot beautifully on 16mm, Ray & Liz proves just as candid and heralds Billingham as a unique cinematic voice.

The narrative unfurls through several vignettes and snapshots of Billingham’s childhood. We begin on an act that frames the other two set pieces – Ray (Patrick Romer) is a bedridden, old man whiling away the reminder of his life by staring out the window of his council flat and getting drunk by 9am on home-brewed beer. We then flashback to the early 80s where a younger Ray (Justin Salinger) and chain smoking Liz (Ella Smith...

The following essay was produced as part of the 2018 Nyff Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that took place during the 56th edition of the New York Film Festival.

Photographers Richard Billingham and Bill Cunningham, across decades and continents, made themselves invisible as they captured people with their cameras. They constantly played with distances — and ideas of distancing — and that allowed their photos to develop into historical documents of their times, capable of collapsing the personal and the social, the indoor and outdoor, and — most startlingly — the private and the public.

Both artists set out on a journey of self-exploration and self-determination that is determined through a long process of photographing others, and both artists created biographies for thousands of nameless people by focusing on the intersections of history, politics, and geography. And now, both artists have inspired films that turn the camera around and do the same for them.

Richard Billingham’s bleak feature-directing debut captures the claustrophobic loneliness of a couple cut off from everyone, including each other

Photographer and artist Richard Billingham makes his feature-directing debut with the bleak Ray & Liz. It was developed from earlier video works and his 1996 collection of photographic studies, entitled Ray’s a Laugh, after the old Ted Ray radio comedy. They were stark, uncompromisingly painful shots of his hard-drinking dad, Ray, and hard-smoking mum, Liz, and originally formed part of Charles Saatchi’s Yba exhibition Sensation with Damien Hirst et al.

Ray and Liz were, of course, depressed – not a diagnosis we were encouraged to make back in the ironic Cool Britannia 90s. This film version makes it clearer and expands the images’ implications into grim and sometimes funny vignettes, fragments of a fragmented family life. The whole film is like an incomplete fragment, intriguing if frustrating.

Patrick Romer plays Ray as an old man,...

Art imitates life “Ray & Liz,” the autobiographical debut feature by Turner Prize-nominated artist Richard Billingham; that’s nothing new. But it’s the way art imitates, reflects and recomposes other art — specifically, Billingham’s much-discussed photography — that lends complex layers of memoir and mimesis to this singular spin on the British kitchen-sink drama, preserving both the director’s childhood and his creative evolution in gorgeous, grainy amber. Collating multiple visual and thematic preoccupations from the director’s fine-art oeuvre (notably his bleakly intimate portraiture of his working-class parents) and filtering them through the ingenious compositional eye of d.p. Daniel Landin, “Ray & Liz” is formally arresting and rigorous, though not at the expense of its direct emotional force. Commercially, this Locarno competition entry is an uncompromisingly hard sell, though festival bookings will come thick and fast.

Familiarity with Billingham’s photographic output is by no means vital to an appreciation of “Ray & Liz,...

If there is an image to best introduce audiences to the grimy cinematic world of Ray & Liz–the remarkable debut feature of Turner prize-nominated visual artist Richard Billingham–it might be, fittingly, the very first one to hit the screen: that of a cracked, burnt-out light bulb filmed dangling beneath a nicotine-stained ceiling. Billingham has spent much of his career as an artist documenting and, in his short films, dramatizing the lives of his father Raymond and mother Elizabeth (Deirdre Kelly and–best of all–Ella Smith) and Ray & Liz could be viewed as a culmination of that work. It’s an immersive poetic-realist dive into the artist’s fractured memories of his parents during the time he spent growing up in Birmingham in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

One could say that the main strength of Ray & Liz is the vividness of those memories. Billingham’s screenplay cuts between three time periods,...

One of our most-anticipated films in the Locarno Film Festival lineup is Ray & Liz, the directorial debut from acclaimed U.K. photographer and artist Richard Billingham. Shot by Under the Skin cinematographer Daniel Landin, the film is divided into three chapters as Billingham recalls his memories of growing up, and specifically his parents’ relationship. World premiering today, the first trailer, clip, and poster have now arrived which shows off the film’s distinct style and promising drama.

“Ray & Liz is a concentration of my own lived experience of growing up in a tower block on a council flat during Thatcher-era Britain. By sticking true to real life, lived experience and observation I want to recreate a world that can only have come about from my being a witness to it,” Billingham said. “Throughout the film Ray and Liz’s relationship is tested by poverty, addiction and being sold short...

Consolidating as one of key sales agents at the Locarno Festival, Fiorella Moretti and Hedi Zardi’s Paris-based Luxbox has acquired sales rights to Richard Billingham’s awaited Golden Leopard contender “Ray & Liz” and “Suburban Birds,” from China’s Qiu Sheng, screening in Cinema of the Present. “Suburban Birds” is Luxbox’s first Chinese title. Both titles were announced July 11 by the Locarno Festival as its unveiled its full lineup. Rapid Eye Movies has already acquired German distribution rights to “Ray & Liz,” meaning Luxbox’s world sales rights deal is for outside the U.K. and Germany.

World premiering in Locarno’s main international competition, and produced by Jacqui Davies at her new production house, Primitive Film, “Ray & Liz” returns to the same bedrock inspiration which launched Billingham’s photographer career in the 90s as the first recipient of the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize: His own family – parents Ray and Liz and younger brother Jason.

The producers are launching a kickstarter campaign to unlock further funding for Ray & Liz.

Turner prize-nominated photographer and artist Richard Billingham is moving into feature films with Ray & Liz, a drama recounting his childhood in a Birmingham council flat.

Billingham has been developing the project with producer Jacqui Davies (The Sky Trembles And The Earth Is Afraid And The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers) for four years, with the support of the BFI and fashion designer agnes b.

The film has its genesis in Ray, a single-screen video artwork that Billingham premiered at the Gylnn Vivian Art Gallery in Wales in June 2015.

Some of the material shot for that project will be used in the first part of Ray & Liz, which will be dividied into three distinct chapters.

Patrick Romer has been cast to play Billingham’s father, while Deidre Kelly, aka White Dee on Channel 4’s reality TV programme Benefits Street as well as Channel...