NNarrative CompetitionOriginal Title: EVERYDAY
Director: Michael Winterbottom
United Kingdom | English
2012 | 94min. | Colour
Subtitles: Arabic
Format: DCP
15+Prolific cinematic explorer Michael Winterbottom applies yet another new approach with EVERYDAY, a portrait of a working-class family divided by the legal system. Told over a period of five years the film follows four real-life siblings and their fictional parents, Ian (John Simm), a convict, and his wife Karen (Shirley Henderson). EVERYDAY employs a calm and observational documentary-style to show the cumulative effect of Simm’s imprisonment on his family.

While Ian is serving a five-year sentence because of a drug-related offence, Karen has to provide for their children. She courageously juggles the demands of her work, being a devoted mother, a supportive wife while making long journeys to her husband in prison. The ups-and-downs of her life, the relationship she and the kids have with the man behind bars is portrayed with a starkly, humanistic realism. The few days he is allowed to spend at home are both tender and heartbreaking.

Portraying everyday life with such detail and delicacy Winterbottom shows that repetition has the extraordinary ability to immerse us in the lives of these ordinary people, to make us care for them in a profound and eventually very rewarding way.

EVERYDAY is a timeless meditation on the hardships and small joys of a family in trouble, and an uncompromising and moving depiction of their heroic struggle.

– Miryam van Lier