Benediction (2022)
Director: Terence Davies Run Time: 137 min. Rating: PG-13 Release Year: 2021
Starring: Calam Lynch, Jack Lowden, Jeremy Irvine, Peter Capaldi, Simon Russell Beale
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
About the film:
Premiered as a Special Presentation at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Legendary 20th Century war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s life-long quest for personal salvation through his experiences with family, war, his writing, and destructive relationships goes unresolved, never realizing it can only come from within. Sassoon, who was decorated for bravery on the Western Front, and is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about the First World War. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war.
After the war, Sassoon lived with unusual openness as a gay man amid the Bright Young Things of 1920s London, before retreating into heterosexual marriage and fatherhood, and converting late in life to Catholicism.
“Terence Davies perfectly balances heavy themes with the champagne fizz of a London society that just wants to forget everything.”
—Philip De Semlyen for Time Out
About the film:
Terence Davies is an English screenwriter, film director, novelist and actor. He is best known as the writer and director of autobiographical films like Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992) and collage film Of Time and the City (2008), as well as literature adaptions like The House of Mirth (2000). He was nominated for the Palme d’Or twice, at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival for The Neon Bible (1995) and at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival for The Long Day Closes (1992). He was made a Fellow of the British Film Institute in recognition of his outstanding contribution to film culture.
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