Thumbs up all round for the first segment of the photographer Richard Billingham’s new feature, Ray and Liz. The film was screened last night (10 February) at a fundraising gathering at the British Film Institute (BFI) in London to an enthusiastic crowd, including the photographer Martin Parr, art-loving designer and long-term Billingham supporter Agnès B, the Photographers’ Gallery director Brett Rogers and Frieze’s Matthew Slotover. The movie revisits Billingham’s chaotic early life on a West Midlands council estate that he first captured so powerfully 20 years ago in Ray’s a Laugh (1990-96), the breakthrough series of photographs that won him the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.
Ray and Liz focuses on the artist’s parents and their tumultuous relationship, described by their son as “tested by poverty, addiction and being sold short of the better things in life.” Royal Shakespeare Company actor Patrick Romer plays Billingham’s alcoholic father, Ray, with almost uncanny accuracy. Billingham’s mother Liz is also convincingly portrayed by Deirdre Kelly, AKA “White Dee” from the Channel 4 documentary series Benefit Street, here in her first acting role. According to Billingham “Dee was a good choice because what happened to her on the TV and Benefit Street, and then going into the Celebrity Big Brother house, is almost what could have happened to Liz in real life.”
Both Romer and Kelly were in attendance at last night’s event, with Kelly confessing that the responsibility of playing Billingham’s mère had made her infinitely more nervous than any of her TV appearances. Also present was the film’s cinematographer Daniel Landin—who shot Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2014) starring Scarlett Johansson—and who here has done an equally exceptional job in translating the very particular quality of Billingham’s photographs into film. He was considerably assisted by the fact that the producer Jacqui Davies managed to secure an almost identical flat in the same Cradley Heath tower block, on the same floor and just across the corridor from the original Billingham family home. Now they need the funds to get back in there to shoot the rest of the film. For info and a range of goodies, potential backers should check the Kickstarter campaign site.
