Last updated: 05 March 2010
The 1990s ushered in a strong dose of reality, with increasing acceptance that a fertile period of Welsh features was not yet on the horizon, but there was still much evidence of burgeoning talent waiting in the wings for opportunities.
The evidence came from dozens of short films of undoubted merit which emerged in the decade from colleges and various initiatives by Sgrin Cymru Wales, in particular. Lack of opportunities for embryo directors to bridge the gap between short filmmaking and features was partly due to lack of adequate funding, while the hiatus in the careers of some more experienced filmmakers could be attributed partly to lack of faith and enterprise by London distributors.
This particularly applied to Welsh language films, as the nation has yet to establish with outsiders a tradition of filmmaking which makes subtitled work from established mainstream filmmaking countries acceptable.
The most startling casualty and victim of blinkered distributors/investors was Paul Turner's Hedd Wyn, which made history in 1994 as the first Welsh language film short-listed for a Hollywood Oscar (best Foreign Language category).
This compassionate film about Ellis Evans, World War One victim who became the only poet to win, posthumously, the coveted Welsh Eisteddfod Bardic Chair for poetry, gained a clutch of Bafta Cymru awards and landed the Royal Television Society's Best TV drama prize. Yet it failed to gain a distribution deal in Britain.
This demoralising state of affairs reflected unfairly on the film's considerable achievements. There was much to admire in the direction, the photography (Ray Orton), editing (Chris Lawrence) and writing (Alan Llwyd).
Barely more successful in reaching its public was One Full Moon (Un Nos Ola Leuad), Endaf Emlyn's impressive and courageous attempt to do justice to Caradoc Prichard's bleak, melodramatic story drawing on incidents on the author's own life.
The film, about a man's Odyssey towards atonement for perceived guilt, was replete with surprises, visual coups, and histrionic characters, but its still centre was Dyfan Roberts, outstanding as a man steeped in memories and the cloying residue of childhood religious repression.
The film gained a limited cinema release but Emlyn came back in style, landing the Audience award for most popular British film at the London film Festival with Leaving Lenin (Gadael Lenin) (1993). Ostensibly a comedy, this perceptive film operated on different levels and proved provocative entertainment.
It revolved around a south Wales school trip to Leningrad and examined the state of a nation in flux, old British left attitudes to Marxism and Communism, a central homosexual relationship across cultures, and reflections on Russian iconographic art (and by implication the moral obligations and duties of the artist, in cinema or otherwise).
The best film from the late 1990s was Marc Evans' House of America (1997), which drew heavily on the successful stage play by the film's screenwriter Ed Thomas, but opened out the action for a denouement, which had its own logic within the film, but aroused conflicting emotions in audiences. The film pivoted around the problems of a west Wales community losing its identity in the wake of an American combine's arrival with an open cast mineworking, but honed in on an incestuous couple obsessed with recreating for themselves the world of writer Jack Kerouac and his lover Joyce Johnson.
The last Twentieth century Welsh film to capture critical accolades was Justin Kerrigan's Human Traffic (1999), an affectionate and shrewd look at youth, club and party culture from a potentially exciting young director who had served notice of his promise in the previous few years, with a group of fine comedies made at Newport Film School.
Human Traffic demonstrated Kerrigan's intimacy and feeling for the milieu and south Wales youth vernacular and had an energy which seduced the critics from both the youth magazines and national critics alike.
Chris Menges, that fine feature film Director of Photography living just over the Welsh border, made an admirable intimate drama, Second Best, in the Borders, though American William Hurt attracted criticism for his wayward Welsh accent.
Newport-born director Peter Greenaway also won more accolades, with The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1990) attracting even more attention than his debut feature The Draughtsman's Contract (1982).
One Welsh actor celebrating his most successful decade was Anthony Hopkins, who not only landed the Oscar for his Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (1991), but provided arguably the two finest performances of his career, both as repressed Englishmen, the butler turning a blind eye to possible aristocratic treason and dubious appeasement in The Remains of the Day (1993), and CS Lewis, the introspective fantasy writer caught up in a late-flowering love affair, in Shadowlands (1994).
In animation Cardiff's Siriol (now Calon), best known in an earlier company manifestation for the children's TV series SuperTed, produced two intriguing 1992 features, a version of Under Milk Wood, directed by Les Orton, and the more cinematic The Princess and the Goblin (co-produced with Hungary).
Joanna Quinn continued to win prizes - with Body Beautiful (1990) another film featuring her valleys heroine Beryl, and her fluent 2D work on Britannia (1993), a satire on Britain's Imperialistic machinations.
Phil Mulloy (with his satires on macho values) and wife Vera Neubauer (with her ambitious feminist work) also impressed with their distinctive animation while Michael Mort's parody of a Terminator-style hero in Hard As Hell (1993), prepared us for his disarming work, with Deiniol Morris, on S4C's The Gogs series with its irreverent take on Neanderthal man.
