WELSH CINEMA IN MARCH
March is turning out to be quite a good month for Welsh cinema, with the release of two feature films into British screens that tell quite different stories, both of them supported by Ffilm Cymru and both by directors based in Wales. One is Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story, directed by Steve Sullivan: a documentary about the legendary papier-maché-headed comedian Frank Sidebottom, and the mind behind the mask, Chris Sievey. A side-angle view of his story, as written by Jon Ronson, has already been turned into the film Frank, starring Michael Fassbender, but that film had little to do with the nuts and bolts of Sidebottom’s trajectory; this should satisfy fans looking for something along those lines.
The other film out this month is Ray & Liz, by Swansea-based photographer-turned-director Richard Billingham. The film leads on from a series of photographs he made in the 1990s of the same title, which depicted his alcoholic father and chainsmoking mother. Growing up in poverty in 70s and 80s Birmingham, the film cuts back and forth in time as we see a lonely Ray in a high-rise bedsit, never leaving his room and spending his days just drinking and smoking, and an earlier time where, newly redundant, he seems to slip away into the margins on family life.
It’s all shot from lived experience for Billingham. “I wanted to make a British story but from a different perspective that feels real and authentic – not one of these things shot through the eyes of a child but something that feels as if it’s memory-based.” Ray & Liz is one of a long strain of British kitchen-sink dramas, but here the poverty feels lived-in and real – not melodramatically excruciating, but average at times.
Billingham remembers his childhood as “actually a happy one, with a lot of unstructured free time,” and although the film showcases scenes that aren’t pleasant to view, there is also light and gentleness and community. You can see echoes of Terence Davies’ monumental Distant Voices, Still Lives in its depiction of the texture, the colour, the smell of British working-class life. Both films are worth seeking out this March.
words Fedor Tot
Ray And Liz is released in cinemas on Fri 8 Mar. Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story is out in cinemas and VOD on Fri 29 Mar