Hedd Wyn

My mother and I sobbed all the way through the second half of this film. To be fair, it can only be properly appreciated if you speak Welsh; the poetry loses everything in translation. It does become pretty mawkish at times but as a true Welsh woman I'm a no-holds-barred sentimentalist and I fell for it hook line and sinker.

The Welsh have been valiantly preserving and promoting their beleaguered language and culture. In recent years, the Welsh film industry blossomed, with such inventive slices-of-life as LEAVING LENIN (1993), which was filmed in St. Petersburg, shown at international film festivals and garnered considerable interest and accolades. It showed to the world that the Welsh language is very much alive.

HEDD WYN is another example, as it depicts the life and death of one of Wales' greatest poets. Ellis Evans (Huw Garmon), under the pen name ÒHedd WynÓ writes thoughtful, spare verse which wins kudos from his countrymen. The son of a farmer, he isn't as educated as some bards, but his kind and genuine nature fuels his talent.

The film evinces his pastoral existence in his native village, his richly nuanced relationships with three different women, his reluctant transformation into a soldier, and his eventual sacrifice in World War I. More a biopic than an exploration of poetic inspiration, the film nonetheless has its lyrical moments, and was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

This story about the tragic life of the beloved Welsh poet Ellis Evans compares favourably with "All Quiet on the Western Front". One comes away from this film convinced of the hopelessness of war and yet, bolstered by the knowledge that for all our general savagery we humans can now and again produce poetry of sublime proportions.

Wales is the part of the United Kingdom about which we don't hear much, and that's what makes Paul Turner's "Hedd Wyn" all the more enjoyable. I had never heard of the title poet until watching it. Ellis Evans proudly wrote in his native language and took as his pseudonym Hedd Wyn, the Welsh words for "blessed peace". But with the arrival of World War I, the English drafted him and sent him to his doom.

The movie is both an indictment of war and of England's domination of Wales. There can be no doubt that the English looked down on the Welsh just as they did the Scots and the Irish, and therefore had no qualms about sending them into harm's way. Evans was disgusted with the jingoism pushed by London, but even he got thrown into the war.

The movie's most impressive quality is of course its use of Welsh. For all that I know, it might be the only movie filmed mainly in Welsh, a language that has some of the most interesting spellings of all. It's just a really good movie. Rwy'n argymell y ffilm (Welsh for "I recommend the movie").

*That's Welsh for "this is impressive".

Generally good, a sad story about the waste of war , with excellent photography and pretty good acting, this film is neverftheless nothing like so good as you might suppose from the awards, praise and glowing reviews. Surely it must have benefited from the shortage of films made in the Welsh language?

Also, it is marred by the simplistic,nationalist approach of the film makers, who seemingly ignore the the fact that the powerlessness of the Welsh common soldiers conscripted into the ranks was mirrored by that of the English working class.

...Meanwhile, in the officer class, the average life span of a first lieutenant was six weeks, which was why Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon were unusual among 'The War Poets' in surviving the war...

The complete lack of gore in the battle scenes detracted from the horror presumbly aimed at by the film makers.

Also, surely the film makers invented or at least embroidered the drama of the love stories? They don't ring true for the North Wales of that era.