Plenty of great films have been made in Wales – but what about films about Wales? Fedor Tot surveys the strange landscape of Welsh cinema.
What comes to mind when you think of Scottish films? Trainspotting? Local Hero? Maybe even films like the works of Lynne Ramsey or the inimitable Under The Skin? What about northern English films? It’s not just the combined works of ol’Ken Loach, but also God’s Own Country and its rootedness in the Yorkshire countryside, or the recent Funny Cow, about a female comic (Maxine Peake) on the 1970s Northern working men’s club circuit. Irish cinema, too, has its own taste and history: the combined works of the McDonagh brothers in films like Calvary, In Bruges, and The Guard immediately come to mind, but so does Brooklyn and Lenny Abrahamson’s films before he went international with Room.
All works that feel like they could have only been made in those particular places – and even the Belgium-set film amongst these, In Bruges, is unmistakeably Irish in its humour and obsession with Catholicism. The more specific a film is about where it’s from, the more chance it seems to have of finding a wider audience – you’ll find the universal in the unique.
So where then, is Welsh cinema?
Much is made of the world-class studios pitching up tent here such as Pinewood, and the fact that big Hollywood films frequently use Wales as a location backdrop – Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott and the entirety of the Harry Potter production crew have used Wales for locations in recent years – which means the best of the best in the industry make a mark on the country. Their presence was preceded by the decision to base Russell T. Davies-led revival of Doctor Who in Cardiff. Since then Bad Wolf Studious are probably the biggest of a batch of energetic young production companies who have set up home here. There’s plenty of funding for film and TV here too, courtesy of BBC Wales and S4C. Yet amidst this energy, Wales rarely ever plays itself.
Even such sizeable domestic hits as Keeping Faith and Hinterland, brilliant though they are, effectively reuse many of the tropes of Scandi-noir whilst simply changing the setting to Wales. Human Traffic and Twin Town, cult hits of the 90s, are both, let’s face it, Welsh versions of Trainspotting. When a sizeable film does get made about Welsh stories – witness the big success of Pride a few years ago – the amount of actual Welsh talent involved is minimal, if at all present.
Yet the history of Wales and the unique geography of it should make for fruitful filmmaking. We have Cardiff – a capital it may be, but it’s a weird capital. Step outside the city centre, and you’ve got miles of low-rise housing; none of the dense population buildup you tend to see in most major cities. The Valleys have their unique mixture of local bonhomie and geographic claustrophobia, houses clinging to the sides of steep hills, the rabbit’s warren of old mines below. The Port Talbot steelworks were apparently an inspiration for the cityscapes in Blade Runner, but why shouldn’t Port Talbot play itself? It might not win anybody’s award for the most beautiful place to live, but ugly places have a habit of looking great onscreen. How else would we have gotten Taxi Driver, The French Connection, and all that great New York cinema of the 70s, when the city was at a historical low point and in the midst of a financial crisis?
Perhaps the reasoning is structural – are Welsh stories treated seriously by producers and those with the power to fund films? We have a thriving local theatrical and literary scene here, brimming with stories relevant to local audiences. Welsh stories that could only have been written by people living here, reeking of Chippy Lane on a Saturday night or of the wild freshness of the Brecon Beacons. It would be great to see some of these stories getting translated to the big screen, giving them a wider audience. It’s worth noting that Gareth Evans, probably the most talented Welsh director currently working, made his big break in Indonesia with The Raid films and not here. We clearly have the technical talent to make brilliant films here – but where are the creative opportunities for a nascent Welsh film industry to tell films about Wales?