SBSW Director Statement

Sacred Birthday, Sacred Wales – Pen-Blwydd yn Gysegredig, Cymru Sanctaidd

“Sacred Birthday, Sacred Wales – Pen-Blwydd yn Gysegredig, Cymru Sanctaidd” was an opportunity to develop a short, experimental video poem as shamanic initiation. The director’s vision for the production design was to paint in film, to create a filmic work with a mixed media, pastel-watercolour, inspired visual look. The production was fortunate to use cinematography of the poem location, Laugharne, a town on the south coast of Carmarthenshire, Wales, UK, by Andrew Gronow, alongside Welsh forest footage by cinematographer Dave Shaw, for the short work. The first line of the poem “And death shall have no dominion” by Dylan Thomas was used in the shot where the director visited the Laugharne final resting place of that incomparable Welsh poet. Welsh voice-over talent Tomos Davies skillfully, and with great depth, expressed the multi-lingual poem. The haunting music of Eric MacLeod perfectly evoked the mournful quality of the writer/director’s poetry. The poem and film “Sacred Birthday, Sacred Wales – Pen-Blwydd yn Gysegredig, Cymru Sanctaidd” both illustrates human access to the underworld and upper world and the otherworldly. There are liminal spaces that may impact humans here in the middle world. Annwn, sometimes written Annwfn, or Annwfyn, is the Otherworld in Welsh mythology, and though a thin place here in the earthly middle world one may be violated spiritually or reach the transcendent. It is tricky to make a film during a pandemic lockdown, with the necessity of social distancing, on a very small budget, yet what humans dream we may do.