Handlung

A lyrical reverie about a young Liverpool boy coming of age in the 1950s among his loving family and the austere Catholic Church as he enters the rigors of school, nurtures a bedazzled love of the movies and longs for companionship.

The Long Day Closes is the story of eleven-year-old "Bud." A sad and lonely boy, Bud struggles through his days. With cinema as his main source of solace, he haunts the local movie-house. All the while, his family looms large in our peripheral vision as do the menacing bullies of his school, but Bud is the center of attention both from the camera's angle and from his doting family. With a gray background, the film fuses clips and audio from classic movies into Bud's dreary childhood and brings it to life with an elegance Bach would bring to your home movies. The overall effect is a montage of memory which seems to ignite flashes of recognition in the viewer.—Mark Fleetwood <mfleetwo@mail.coin.missouri.edu>

It's the mid-1950s in working class Liverpool. Preteen Bud, who lives with his Mum and his three older siblings, Kev, John and Helen, is shaped by their loving home environment, their Catholic faith, the strictness of his school environment which makes him often daydream, being bullied by three of his classmates in part with their taunts of he being a "fruit", and his love of the movies, going to the cinema and watching them his favorite activity. Even when he is by himself with seemingly nothing to do, he will stare out the window in observing the goings-on outside which further shapes his life in their connection to his inner thoughts. A series of somewhat unconnected vignettes, many presented in a pseudo-dreamlike manner, over the course of approximately mid-1955 to late-1956, provide a collage of Bud's life, but when taken together form a more complete picture of him.—Huggo