The Silent Village

More about the book

In September 1942, a Crown Film Unit crew arrived in the Upper Swansea Valley at the small village of Cwmgiedd, close to the town of Ystradgynlais. Under the supervision of the artist, poet and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, they set out to make a short film that recreated the fate of Lidice. This exhibition and accompanying publications examine from a new perspective the distinctive relations of time and place that defined Humphrey Jennings' original film. The film has provided contemporary artists and writers with an opportunity to reflect on the circumstances that brought it into being and some of the issues it raises. The artists Paolo Ventura and Peter Finnemore, the writer Rachel Trezise and the film historian David Berry, offer their response to a film that is both a reconstruction of the Lidice atrocity and a film about Welsh life in the early 1940s."