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Machynys Forgets Itself
Film
2023
Supported by:
Freelands Foundation
Arts Council Wales
St Fagans National Museum of History
g39Written, Produced, Directed by:
Tom Cardew
Exhibitions + Screenings:
Walls Have Teeth (group screening); Dyddiau Du, Cardiff
2025
Oriel Davies (Solo Exhibition); Newtown, Wales
2024
Analogue Ensemble; Ramsgate
2023
In the Same Breathe (Screening Programme): Site Gallery, Sheffield; ps2, Belfast; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
2023
In the Same Breathe; Freelands Foundation, London
2023
Soft Split the Stone; g39, Cardiff
2023
Cinematographer:
Roger Graham
Sound Engineer:
Chloe Blissett + Tim Bromage
Performers:
Tom Wills
Callum Humphreys
Roisin Bonar
Celeste Turnbull
Brooke Thomas
Duration:
16 minutes 35 seconds
Details:
9:16 + 4K HD
Film Release Blurb:
Machynys Forgets Itself is a film about place, memory, and transformation, tracing the layered histories of a small peninsula on the edge of Llanelli, South Wales. Once the site of a sixth-century monastic settlement and later a major centre of tinplate production, Machynys was home to a working-class community until its demolition in the 1970s. Today it has been remade as a golf course, spa, and gated housing estate — a landscape overwritten by successive regimes of faith, industry, and capital.
The film reimagines these shifting strata of time through an absurdist lens, drawing on surrealist strategies and the fractured visual language of social media. Live action, archival footage, AI-generated imagery, and lip-sync performance fold together, creating an anachronistic atmosphere where history and the present collide. Humour threads through this fracture, making space for both displacement and survival, where the sacred, the industrial, and the neoliberal uncanny share the same ground.








