Film – Miners Strike 1985

When the renowned Swedish film director Kjell-Ake Andersson was a young man, he visited South Wales in 1973 on a photographic expedition. Travelling on a shoe string, with his girlfriend and eight month old daughter Matilda he was taken in to a miner’s home in Bargoed. They stayed together in the village for three months, talking with the people and  taking photographs, returning twice in the following year. Widely accepted by the miners and their families, Anderson’s photographs portrayed their lives in intimate detail. His book, Gruvarbetare in Wales, was published in Sweden in 1977 and has become recognised as one of the most perceptive visual accounts of mining life in that period. One of the photographs is included inside The Shadows of the Mine and we are hoping to find a way of exhibiting his work in Wales in 2022.

Today Andersson often looks back to the time at Bargoed and recalls ‘meeting the mining community has made a great impact in my life. The generosity and solidarity and friendship I have never forgotten’.

He did return to the valleys in 1985 to make another important contribution. By this time established in film making, his documentary, Breaking Point, on the 1984-85 strike at Oakdale provided a telling account of the community in the snows of January. He has provided us with a version of this film: the narration is in Swedish, but the sounds of the valley town and the words of its people can be clearly heard, bringing back memories of the weeks before the strike ended. Take a look.