The Rex has seen decidedly better days. But so has all of Wales – make that: Great Britain. We’re in the mid-1980s, and vast swaths of the country are engaged in the bitterest mining strikes seen here in generations. In 1984-85, for three days less than a year, colliers were fighting for their work. What is the closing of a cinema compared to that, what a projectionist like Trevor and an ice cream lady like Mona now out of their jobs? Still, they matter just as we’ll do, and they won’t give up on their new-found love nor on The Rex, they all are still good for something, like maybe… growing mushrooms in the venue’s dank darkness (the normal ones, not the varieties that offer experiences similar to avant-garde films). But for all that cheerful let’s-make-the-best-out-of-it, Eli, the old and ailing cinema owner, has a point when he asks: Take the cinema away from us and what other means of escape is there?
There is something hopeful to the fact that the first film in Welsh that got widely distributed in foreign-tongue territories like England deals with a vanishing popular art praxis – maybe this can be resurrected just like Cymraeg? It may not be like it once was, but still we can say with Welsh folk singer legend Dafydd Iwan: Yma o Hyd (“Still Here”).
Olaf Möller