Days Ending in Y

I directed ‘Days’ at 21 years old in my hometown of Bridgend, Wales. Wales has been a neglected location in cinema, with ‘iconically’ Welsh films largely being shot elsewhere and rarely featuring Welsh actors. I was tremendously lucky to have been provided the opportunity by my producers to shoot wherever I felt the narrative required. A unique place of bucolic beauty, underlined by an economically depressed post-industrial sadness, I feel the story being shot in Bridgend is integral to its fabric.

The film is intended to capture the sensation of a profoundly strange time in my life, a summer where I worked in a care home and kebab shop whilst living in a Bridgend bedsit with three coworkers: one was deported while living with me, whilst the other two never told me their names. This summer ended with my car being totaled by an uninsured drunk driver the day after I’d finally paid off my third-party-only insurance. Whilst the film doesn’t follow all these events directly, this absurdity, the feeling of all those around me experiencing life in a way I simply didn’t understand, is the heart of ‘Days’.

More than simply being about myself, the film came from an amalgamation of stories from friends and loved ones. I wanted to represent the people of Wales as I see them, not as those writhing in hopelessness as some kitchen sink realists present them, but as the intensely humorous, overbearingly caring, and beautifully absurd people I grew up alongside. For Rollie, and perhaps for myself that summer, embracing this absurdity was, and is, required. A change of perspective; a willingness to laugh.