Hyde Park Pick: Effi o Blaenau

Here are a few key ones we’ve already been shouting about:

🌟 It's the only Welsh language film to be released so far this year. We'd love to see more Welsh language films & hope the more people who come see this, the more likely that might become.

🌟 Like The Odyssey, it's another great opportunity to delve into Greek mythology, as it's based on Gary Owen's much-lauded play, Iphigenia in Splott, which explores the Greek legend of Iphigenia.

🌟 Unlike The Odyssey, it had a small budget, so is very much worth supporting to make extraordinary filmmaking feel more viable to other small filmmakers & encourage distributors to back films which are small in budget, but not in impact.

🌟 Despite having roots in mythology, it feels incredibly real and relevant, tackling social issues of today, showing a grittier side to Wales rather than its spectacular mountains.

🌟 The performances, particularly of Effi, played by Leisa Gwenllian, are phenomenal.

For this Pick, I particularly want to dig into that last one and why Leisa Gwenllian is the rising star we are really excited about.  

Effi o Blaenau’s historic rooting may be Greek myth, but Owen's celebrated play, Iphigenia in Splott, is its contemporary source.

Iphigenia in Splott opened at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, in 2015. It went on to help secure both the Best New Play at the UK Theatre Awards 2015 and the James Tait Black Drama Prize for its playwright.

Iphigenia in Splott was a one-woman monodrama, and that’s part of where the electricity around it forms. The play builds space for a singular character/performer to hold the audience for its duration, bringing to mind other recent urgent pieces of contemporary work like Suzie Miller's Prima Facie. In taking that format and transferring it to a more expansive cinematic space, it might be easy to lose some of the power of that central performance.

Thankfully, Leisa Gwenllian holds every scene as the absolute centre of attention no matter what else is happening. There’s a cast of other characters who are important, but ultimately this is all Gwenllian's, or more accurately, Effi’s story.

Throughout the duration of the film she dips between the embodiment of the many different faces of youth and vitality, sometimes strong, sometimes cruel, sometimes fractured and broken. At different points in the story, Effi stands as a proxy for a range of different deeper-rooted messages. But she also never ceases to be a young woman fighting to live an authentic life with the opportunities ahead she should be afforded as a basic right. In walking these different lines of symbolism and authenticity of story, the sincerity of Leisa Gwenllian’s performance is the heart of the film, and one can’t help but care for her deeply.

Effi O Blaenau is showing at HPPH from Sat 25 Jul. You can find out more & book tickets here.