7 Miles Out

It is 1977. Manchester is on the verge of becoming the underground music capital of the world, and seven miles away in Stockport, eleven-year-old Ann is on the verge of something equally big: puberty. Then one morning, her dad takes her to school, drives away and kills himself.

Left alone with her unravelling mother (and a doomed rabbit called Bugsy), Ann tries to make sense of their new life with the help of a strange cast of characters who pass through the family's boarding house. Unable to escape the shadow of grief and guilt, she sets out to find her own way to stay alive.

Carol Morley was born in 1966 in Stockport and is the younger sister of the music journalist Paul Morley. She has written and directed a number of films. These include her BAFTA-nominated The Alcohol Years, about her wild days on the Manchester music scene and the critically acclaimed Film Four and BFI backed Dreams of a Life, about the life of thirty-eight year old Joyce Vincent who was found in her London flat three years after she died. Her BBC and BFI film The Falling, about a mysterious fainting epidemic in a 1969 school, which stars Maisie Williams, Maxine Peake and Greta Scaachi, is due for UK cinema release in April 2015.