It was at a bus stop in Newcraighall, an ex-mining village south of Edinburgh, that Bill Douglas met Stephen Archibald. Skiving off school with a mate, Archibald had asked Douglas for a fag. Back where he grew up, the director was on his way to a school to cast for the film he was piecing together. Instead, Douglas decided to cast the two truants in My Childhood (1972), with Archibald playing Jamie, the lead character based on Douglas himself.

The film opens with a title card—’1945. A Scottish Mining Village. German P.O.W.s work the fields.’—its simplicity pervading the short film. Jamie lives in poverty with his grandmother and half-brother Tommy, their mother’s mental health problems leaving her hospitalised. He finds paternal care in Helmuth, one of the German prisoners. His father, Jamie learns, lives down the road, but is unconcerned with the young lad. With the war ending, Helmuth is transported from the village, which is shortly followed by the death of his grandmother, leaving Jamie near alone and yearning for escape.

But My Childhood doesn’t lend itself to plot summary. Douglas is resurrecting and enacting memories, which time has left discrete, having sifted all that was between. The sparse dialogue and static camera further add to the honesty of recollection – it is, after all, images and not words which linger longest. And Douglas created the most striking black and white scenes, ensuring that his memories also become part of ours.

In the opening shots of the film, for instance, we see the village children welcome the miners leaving their shift. Standing atop the black mountain of the mine’s waste heap, Jamie watches, a face of unmoving vulnerability, the wind catching his collar and the holes of his sweater. Or, equally spectacular, after the death of his pet bird, Tommy sprints through the village to the railway bridge and is engulfed in the steam of a passing train, disappearing and reappearing, his arms flung up in ecstatic despair. Rhyming with these two scenes, My Childhood closes with Jamie climbing over the bridge’s railings and falling through the steam into a pile of coal, rolling into the distance with the train and its load.

Douglas combines these evocative images with delicate, smaller-scale observations to create a deeply poetic yet stubbornly unsentimental film of childhood poverty and loss. My Childhood won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1972 and remains unlike many other British films. With its emphasis on gesture, image and composition, it is closer to the silent cinema and Soviet collagists of the early twentieth century than its British contemporaries. The closest comparison, though, is with the French director Robert Bresson, with whom Douglas shares a minimalist precision and intensity.

My Childhood is the first of a trilogy that chart the protagonist’s way to adulthood. Maintaining the the singular style of the first, Douglas’ poetic imagery echoes between the three. My Ain Folk (1973) sees Jamie enter into the reluctant and miserable care of his father and grandmother. Joy and escape is found, though, in the cinema. ‘That was my real home, my happiest place when I was lucky enough to be there,’ Douglas later wrote. At the film’s close, his father is getting married and leaves Jamie to be taken into care, with My Way Home (1978) taking the story on from there. Following employment in the mine and then a tailors, Jamie is drafted into the RAF and stationed in Egypt, where Douglas completed his military service in the mid-fifties.

In Egypt, Jamie develops his only friendship of the trilogy, with the middle class and well-read Robert, and begins to take seriously the possibility of becoming an artist. Our watching of his trilogy, then, is Douglas’ valediction, the end of the story that follows those final minutes of My Way Home. Robert was based on Peter Jewell, who Douglas met during service and remained his closest friend. Jewell was Douglas’ sounding board, his source of support and encouragement. It was him that bought Douglas his first camera one Christmas. ‘I wandered the streets filming everything I could set my eyes […] In no time at all I talked my way into the London Film School,’ graduating the year before the release of My Childhood.

Despite the acclaim for the trilogy, Douglas struggled to get his next project off the ground. He eventually completed Comrades, his story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, but it garnered a limited cinema release in 1987. While made in colour and on a bigger scale, Douglas presents the story of the six farm labourers, their conviction for trade unionism and transportation to Australia in a similarly stunning, moving and often intimate style. Central to the film is the lanternist, who tells the tale of the six through a magic lantern. Douglas was fascinated with early cinema and the magic lantern emphasises the importance of moving image to the propagation of radical history and ideas.

Comrades was Douglas’ final film before he died of cancer in 1991 at the age of 57. While only managing to complete four films, adding up to less than six hours, Douglas’ achievement is undeniable. He overcame the troubles of childhood poverty and neglect to realise an uncompromised cinematic vision of honest beauty, which remains unique nearly half a century on. Douglas was certainly singular in his artistry, but his achievements are also down to the support and care of his friends and mentors, most importantly Peter Jewell.

There have been few artists like Bill Douglas, but it’s important to remember that there are children that hold dreams like his which will remain unrealised. This is a problem of access, raising questions of opportunity, funding and continued support in an industry that is stacked against working-class people. Too often, though, concerns of access focus on the price of tickets and ensuring as large an audience as possible. This reduces culture to a passive exercise rather than an active, participatory one. Democratising creativity is necessary to realisation of these dreams.

But it is also a problem with the notion of ‘accessibility’. With its emphasis, certain styles or directors are condescendingly assigned as unsuitable to the disadvantaged, and left to be consumed by the elite. Used in funding and production, accessibility encourages conservatism, limiting the potential vision of filmmakers. How would Douglas’ films fare today? Given that they are commonly cast as difficult and impenetrable, likely not well. It is seriously telling that Douglas’ cinema, an emphatic case of working-class people making culture, is deemed inaccessible and unsuitable for the class he depicts and represents.