Ray & Liz

British photographer Richard Billingham rose to fame with his unconventional family photo album *RAY’S A LAUGH* (1996). Now, in his cinematic debut *RAY & LIZ*, he returns—with only slight fictionalization—to the visual and character world of his greatest success: back to his parents, who live with their two children in a dilapidated apartment in the West Midlands. Everyday life is hard and not exactly warm, yet Billingham allows a grim humor to shine through the bleakness, along with a tender empathy, especially for Ray, who drinks his way through the day with stoic discipline. Richard Billingham’s parents both died young. They never knew that their son had transformed their lives into art through his photographic work and now in a film. But even more than to them, Billingham seems to have dedicated his film to his younger brother Jason. Billingham evokes the world of the 1980s not through nostalgic details, but through a consistent formal approach: Ray & Liz is shot in 4:3 format, dense and enclosed like the rooms themselves. The images appear almost painted—with their heavy wallpaper, the soft light falling from the side, and a deliberately shallow depth of field. Ray & Liz is a brutally personal film that seeks to observe rather than narrate. Richard Billingham reconstructs his childhood in early 1980s England not in the mode of a classic social study, but as a fragmentary memory: fragile, casual, and episodic in structure. “The sensitivity to visual composition and lighting, as well as an enormous feel for the interplay of characters, space, and set design, transcend the raw social realism of the film shot on 16mm. In the process, memory is transformed into material of a sometimes painful beauty.” (Lexikon des Internationalen Films)