Total Film Magazine's 23 Awesome Welsh Movies

A mixture of actors and real people in a human story about the affects of pit closure on a close-knit Welsh village mining community.

Julian and Jeremy, two brothers prefer to spend their time on drugs and joyriding. When their father, Fatty Lewis, they show up demanding compensation.

In a Welsh coal mining valley, a young man with a beautiful singing voice is called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice when a pit disaster threatens.

The central character is a working man, David Griffiths, known in the film as "Dafydd Rhys", a school caretaker for decades and a former miner. Dafydd"s later years in Ammanford at Amman Valley Grammar School present an ordinary man with extraordinary virtues. His innate dignity is seen here as an inspiration to the film"s narrator Ifor Morgan, who recalls in adulthood his experiences as a school pupil under David"s wing. The actual David Griffiths never achieved the fame of his brother, the miners" leader and first Welsh secretary Jim Griffiths, but here represents a traditional Welsh proletarian "type", who communicates a strong sense of his community"s worth and retains a fierce loyalty to the memory of his fellow pit men. The film"s most poignant section deals with the impact on David of the death of his son, Gwilym, from tuberculosis, and the effect on Ifor and his fellow pupils of the caretaker"s temporary estrangement from them as he retreats into himself and his memories. Dafydd is also shown leaving the Eisteddfod after his poem, an elegy to his dead son, has failed to win the coveted Chair. Amanwy did win several other chairs which can be found in church halls around South Wales.

A young poet living in the North Wales countryside competes for the most coveted prize of all in Welsh Poetry - that of the chair of the National Eisteddfod, a tradition dating back a hundred years. Before the winner is announced Hedd Wyn gets sent to fight with the English in the trenches of the First World War

Boyo lives with his brother Sid, his sister Gwenny and their elderly mother Marlene in an economically depressed area of South-West Wales. Their father has vanished when they were small children, apparently headed for America. The leather-jacketed, motorbike-riding Sid has grown up obsessed with American culture and dreams of joining his father in the States. When the brothers discover that an open-cast mine is opening nearby they join the scramble for jobs, but their mother is unaccountably against the idea. On the morning when they need to report for work, they find she has sabotaged Sid"s bike, scuppering their chances of employment. Sid and Gwenny begin to spend more and more of their considerable spare time together, washing down medication they"ve obtained under their mother"s name with pilfered booze. Marlene"s increasingly eccentric behaviour leads to her being interred in a hospital, but Boyo is powerless to stop his brother and sister from drifting dangerously out of touch with reality.

Outnumbered British soldiers do battle with Zulu warriors at Rorke"s Drift.

A group of Welsh rugby fans descend on Paris for the final game of the season.

At the turn of the century in a Welsh mining village, the Morgans, he stern, she gentle, raise coal-mining sons and hope their youngest will find a better life.

Five youngsters embrace the 90s clubbing scene on a drug-fuelled weekend of partying in Cardiff.

A frustrated librarian (Sellers) in Swansea, Wales is torn between his wife Jean (Maskell) and a glamorous married woman, Liz (Zetterling), who wants to have an affair.

A young Welsh soldier on duty in northern Ireland shoots a terrorist in self defense and is used as scapegoat by the political system.

A twelve-year-old tomboy witnesses the murder of a woman by her Polish merchant marine boyfriend, but bonds with him and thwarts the police in their investigation.

Rob returns to Dolwyn, a village, from which he was ousted for thievery, to buy the land so that his master can flood the village to build a dam. He faces opposition from an old woman and her son.

After many years in prison a man returns to his town of birth. The memories from his childhood, which culminate in the inexplicable murder of a young girl, are portrayed through flashbacks. The man walks through the town, the same way he walked as a boy.

An enthusiastic young doctor happily embarks on his career, but it isn"t long before he finds out what being a doctor really entails.

Seven teenagers and three teachers from a Welsh school visit Russia in a bid to rediscover themselves. On the overnight sleeper service to St Petersburg the students get separated from the teachers, which allows the students ample scope for rediscovery.

Brothers from a Welsh village take their first trip to London to collect a prize, and meet a con artist and various other urban distractions.

When an English cartographer must tell a Welsh village that their mountain is only a hill, the offended community sets out to change that.

A newspaper reporter is lured into a mire of pagan rituals and human sacrifice.

A tragic love story between a Jewish young man and a Welsh woman in the beginning of the century. The movie is mostly in English with parts in Welsh and Yiddish.

Actor/writer Kenneth Griffith"s polemic eulogy to Irish patriot Michael Collins.

After her father suffers a stroke, his daughter is forced to take care of him.