SYNOPSIS
Everyday. This potent, unassuming film from Michael Winterbottom is dedicated in both story and filmmaking approach to the passing of time. Four young children are growing up with their mother while their father is in prison for a crime that is never dwelt on. Karen (the always compelling Shirley Henderson in her sixth film with Winterbottom) juggles the demands of their everyday lives with her job as a bartender at the village local and the long train journeys to visit her husband Ian (John Simm). As the children grow-up, Ian’s incarceration and the family separation becomes simultaneously intolerable and routine. This impressive and delicate film is rendered all the more powerful by its deceptively simple script and its observational style. Shot over five years, the children change on screen, with all the subtle shifts and strange leaps of emotion and intellect that usually only a parent could trace. Winterbottom’s nomadic eye is always attuned to the spontaneous and the impulsive, his filmmaking and his actors revelling in the immediacy of a roving camera or a resonant jolt in performance. In EVERYDAY this restlessness is tempered by the impact of duration and punctuated by beautiful still landscape interludes and Michael Nyman’s tremulous score.
Premied at the BFI London Film Festival on 17 October 2012