The Bill Douglas Trilogy

Director: Bill Douglas

1973 / 172min / DCP

Douglas’s triptych of mid-length films, featuring some of the starkest black-and-white images ever etched into celluloid, introduces his alter ego, Jamie (Stephen Archibald, growing from child to young man in the course of the trilogy). The films follow Jamie—born, like Douglas, into grinding poverty in a Scottish mining town—through, first, an early life of emotional and material depredation, then, eventually, to his discovery of the pleasures of literature and the possibilities art offers for a more richly lived life, this in large part made possible through his budding friendship with a middle-class Englishman, Robert (Joseph Blatchley). A clear-eyed depiction of the dour dolor of postwar austerity, both bracingly brutal and tentatively hopeful, and “one of the greatest experiences the cinema has to offer.” [The Observer]

My Childhood (1972), 46 minutes

My Ain Folk (1973), 55 minutes

My Way Home (1978), 71 minutes

Distributor: Janus Films

Introduction by Edo Choi on Sunday, November 16th