Cinema
Above Us the Earth
Karl Francis · 1977
Synopsis
A pit in the coalfield is closing. The film follows what happens around it: the men who go down one last time, those who talk about leaving, the committee that negotiates with the management and gets nothing, the women who count what will remain. A father and his son disagree about what should be done. Acted scenes alternate with filmed interviews in which the same men speak in their own name.
Context
The work was done in 1975, during and after the real closure of a southern pit, with the miners themselves in their own roles, and it mixes staged scenes and interviews without warning. This confusion is deliberate: the viewer does not always know what he is watching, and that is the point. The technique was new in the British Isles at that date. It won its author a prize in London and long remained impossible to find, the prints having been struck in very few copies.
Who it is for
An hour and a half in the English of the valleys, subtitled. The mixture of the acted and the caught on the spot is disorienting, and meant to be.
Prizes and reception
One of the very first feature films shot in Wales on a Welsh subject, and long unobtainable.