Effi o Blaenau: a fierce portrait of resilience in north Wales

You might think that portions of the 1935 film Y Chwarelwr (The Quarryman) were shot from a plane. But if you know Blaenau Ffestiniog, the quarry town in north Wales, you’ll recognise the perspective afforded by the slate tips that wall the place like a fortress. Familiar, too, will be the light: a flat, shadowless grey from the moody clouds that lid the town. But you might not recognise the bustling industry chronicled in the film. A century on, many houses are boarded up, and the quarry is a museum. ‘To Let’ signs hang from shops, chapels and pubs. Y Chwarelwr was the first ‘talkie’ in Welsh; Marc Evans’ new feature Effi o Blaenau is one of the latest, returning audiences to Blaenau in the present day.

In cinema, landscape and language create senses of a place and its people. The slate tips that surround us in Effi o Blaenauare scars in a landscape that was industrialised and then jettisoned. The language spoken in the film is typical of the area, where Welsh is the mother tongue. Here, Celtic lyricism abuts gutter-English (or bratiaith, as we call it, ‘ragged language’), expletives are many, and consonants are explosive cover-ups for something tender. As the protagonist puts it: “Life is hard here and the people are tough.”

Played with raw intensity by Leisa Gwenllian, Effi introduces herself by recounting her habitual three-day hangover routine from which she arises – an Aphrodite in Radox foam – to commence the bingeing all over. The monologue is visceral and rhythmic, hinting at the film’s theatrical origins.

Adapting the 2015 monologue Iphigenia in Splott, Evans worked with playwright Gary Owen, whose original play imagined the Greek myth in working-class Cardiff. The play captures the political anger of austerity Britain and more specifically, a sense of disposability in a deindustrialised nation. The play is a favourite in Wales, familiar to many a drama student (Gwenllian first played Iphigenia aged 15 at an Eisteddfod performing arts festival). Shifting the story to the Welsh-speaking north, Evans brings a further layer of cultural survival to the narrative. However, Effi o Blaenau is all the more powerful because it does not parade its politics. The context is visible in the landscape; the anger is there in the glorious expletives and swigs of Smirnoff that kick-start Effi’s spiralling tale.

Effi is the girl we’ve all seen pre-gaming at the bus stop or falling through the cracks of the system into another statistic. “I just couldn’t stop thinking about the real-life Effis,” Gwenllian said in a recent interview. Camerawork by Eira Wyn Jones adds intimacy that never veers into voyeurism. While early reviews compare Evans to Ken Loach, Clio Barnard and an older kitchen-sink drama tradition, I was most reminded of Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970). With high ponytails and low spirits, Wanda and Effi topple into life in heels and insecurity; life happens to them and is not kind. Loden’s direction and Wyn Jones’s cinematography understand the power of isolating a figure in a landscape to accentuate vulnerability and courage. In 1970, Wanda picked her way through coal tips in Carbondale, Illinois; half a century later, Effi wanders through slate tips after a fateful night out.

Poverty and neglect shape Effi’s world as it did Wanda’s. In a strikingly contemporary turn, Evans’s film stages a difficult conversation about NHS maternity care in which there are no villains, only overworked midwives and underfunded hospitals. Caught in a storm of budget cuts and labour pains, Effi is stranded. Her TikTok pouts dissolve into open-mouthed anguish – Gwenllian’s emotional range is remarkable. The character is hard and tender, fierce and afraid. “We’re all so fragile and small. And so easily hurt,” Effi tells the one-night stand she hopes will save her, offering him a compassion she seldom affords herself.

Weathering the storms, Effi refuses to sink. Ninety years ago, Y Chwarelwr chronicled the hardships of Blaenau and its community spirit. With women at the helm, Effi o Blaenau continues this tradition. The film proves that the most specific landscapes can articulate far-reaching truths, and is another reminder that it’s well past time for the ‘British’ cinematic canon to include more languages than English.

► Effi o Blaenau is in UK cinemas 19 June.