“Well-nigh flawless” was how film historian Dave Berry described the Ealing-style comedy, Rhosyn a Rhith, screened by RTS Cymru Wales in August at Sinemaes, a pop-up cinema on the National Eisteddfod field, held this year in Pontypridd.
Produced by Red Rooster Films for S4C, the film is set in South Wales in the aftermath of the miners’ strike in the mid-80s. Adapted by Urien Wiliam from Ruth Carter’s original script, Coming Up Roses, it was the first Welsh language film to receive a UK theatrical release when it was screened (with English subtitles) in 1987.
Rhosyn a Rhith was described as “sweetly daffy” by The New York Times and a “funny observant film” by Observer film critic Philip French. Starring some of Wales’s leading actors, it tells how a cinema has to close, making the projectionist (Dafydd Hywel) and ice-cream attendant (Iola Gregory) redundant. In the weeks before closure, they devise a bizarre scheme to grow mushrooms in the cinema’s damp dark interior to pay off the debts.
The film’s location was Aberdare’s Rex Cinema, a few miles from Pontypridd, which had already closed. In a panel discussion before the screening, chaired by Swansea University lecturer Dr Elain Price, Mari Emlyn, who played June, described the never-ending rain during the shoot and how the film’s US director, Stephen Bayly, had suggested that she watched Gregory “very carefully as the camera loves her”.
Fellow panellist, S4C Drama Commissioner Gwenllian Gravelle, revealed how the broadcaster is working with Ffilm Cymru and Creative Wales to develop film projects.
