More Than Time: A beautiful film about Liverpool during lockdown

 

Every city was hit hard by the first Covid-19 lockdown. 

Businesses, schools, shops, churches, restaurants and pubs closed. Deserted streets. Windswept squares. 

Liverpool was no different. 

A city whose joie de vivre – it calls itself the ‘pool of life’ – was suddenly lifeless and joyless. 

The post-work pub crowd stayed in the suburbs, the trains of stag and hen parties from Euston stopped coming. And the gangs of Rab/Under Armour-clad scallies took their mountain bikes, side-partings and snarls elsewhere. 

Filmmaker Carl Hunter, whose Sometimes, Always, Never movie was global hit last year, knew there was something unique happening. Something that needed to be captured. 

So he did what comes naturally, and made a short film – More Than Time – now available to watch on YouTube.

But this no ordinary movie. Instead, it combines still photography of Liverpool’s landmarks with messages left on an answering machine, in which anonymous city residents talk about what they’re missing most about their pre-Covid lives.

The messages relate to Carl’s images: so when one caller talks about her yearning for Peter Kavanagh’s, a unique pub in Liverpool 8, you see it, too. The same is true of those who talk about the likes of the Cunard building, Everyman theatre, Goodison Park, Great Homer Street market and the Philharmonic Hall. In every caller you can hear the same sense of loss.

The atmosphere is increased thanks to the ambient-classical soundtrack by Steve Grimes, who along with Carl, is a member of Liverpool indie group, The Farm. It’s balanced beautifully by the eerie sound design of one of Carl’s regular collaborators, Sam Auguste, who adds children’s voices, distant crowd noises, pages turning, footsteps and traffic to the mix. 

The mood is summed up by one regular worshipper who says: “We’re living through a less-than time, and in church it’s a more-than time”.

Away from filmmaking, Carl is a senior lecturer in media at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, on the outskirts of Liverpool. The film was produced by the university’s Institute For Creative Enterprise (ICE). Its director (and More Than Time’s producer) says: 

“Carl has made a beautiful and moving work of art, which matches exquisite photography with Steve’s soaring soundtrack. The result is both serenely still and extremely cinematic, telling a story grounded in place but open to possibility.”

And it’s possibly the most poignant thing we’ve witnessed all year. 

YouTube