• Machynys Forgets Itself

    Film

    2023



    Supported by:

    Freelands Foundation
    Arts Council Wales
    St Fagans National Museum of History
    g39

    Written, 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.