And When Did You Last See Your Father? DVD 2008

Film based on Blake Morrison's candid memoir of his father in the weeks leading up to his death. Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent) is diagnosed with terminal cancer and told he only has a few weeks left to live. His son Blake (Colin Firth) is visiting his mother (Juliet Stevenson) in Yorkshire in the village where he grew up. Blake visits his father in the hospital and begins to contemplate the intimacies and irritations of the relationship they have had over the years. His father has been a raffish, insensitive but loving man resented by his son, especially during the son's teenage years (the teenage Blake is portrayed by Matthew Beard). Blake wants to make peace with his father who has never realized how his behaviour gave rise to those resentments. After his father's death, Blake questions the nature of the bond between them, articulately expressing the contradictions, frustrations, love and loss bound into the complicated relationships which most of us have with our parents as we grow up.