Wales One World Film Festival
Gŵyl Ffilm Cymru a'r Byd yn Un

Yng ngoleuni'r amgylchiadau presennol, rydym wedi penderfynu gohirio Gŵyl Ffilm WOW. Ni fydd unrhyw un o'r dangosiadau a'r digwyddiadau sydd ar y gweill dros y mis nesaf yn digwydd. Bydd gan unrhyw un sydd wedi prynu tocyn ymlaen llaw hawl i gael ad-daliad llawn.

Mae hyn yn teimlo fel y peth cyfrifol i'w wneud gan ein bod yn credu mai'r rhesymeg hollgyffredinol yw cyfyngu cyswllt cymdeithasol yn ystod pandemig. Rydym yn gobeithio mai dim ond gohirio yw hwn ac y gallwn redeg yr ŵyl yn nes ymlaen. Fodd bynnag, mae cymaint o bethau anhysbys ar hyn o bryd fel nad yw'n glir a fyddwn mewn sefyllfa i wneud hynny. Byddwn yn eich diweddaru chi i gyd wrth i bethau symud ymlaen.

Os hoffech gael rhestr o ffilmiau argymelledig yn ystod eich cyfnod o hunan-ynysu, croeso i chi fy e-bostio ar gyfer fy argymhellion diweddaraf.

David Gillam
Cyfarwyddwr Gŵyl Ffilm Un Byd WOW Cymru

Diweddariad COVID-19 / Coronafeirws:

Rydym wedi penderfynu gohirio dangosiad y Clwb Ffilm Merched o "Made in Bangladesh" (Amgueddfa Genedlaethol y Glannau, dydd Sadwrn 14 Mawrth) ac "Abercon", ein cynhadledd anime hygyrch (Canolfan y Celfyddydau Aberystwyth, dydd Sadwrn 21 Mawrth).

Mae Clwb Ffilm Merched WOW ac Abercon yn gwasanaethu rhai o aelodau mwyaf agored i niwed ein cymunedau. Byddai'n anghyfrifol ohonom i roi eu hiechyd ac iechyd eu teuluoedd mewn perygl diangen ar adeg o ansicrwydd mawr.

Mae'n ddrwg gennym achosi unrhyw siom a hoffem ddiolch i bawb sydd wedi cefnogi'r digwyddiadau hyn, gan gynnwys Amgueddfa Genedlaethol y Glannau, Cyngor Dinas Abertawe, Grŵp Ffoaduriaid a Cheiswyr Lloches Merched Abertawe a Mencap Ceredigion.

Ar hyn o bryd, rydym yn ymgynghori â'n lleoliadau partner ynghylch a ddylid bwrw ymlaen nawr â gweddill rhaglen Gŵyl Ffilm WOW ai peidio, a byddwn yn postio diweddariadau yma.

Filmed in Eastern Al Ghouta between 2016 and 2018, The Cave immerses its audience in the unfamiliar, disorienting environment of an underground hospital. For besieged civilians, hope and safety lie underground, where paediatrician and managing physician Dr. Amani Ballour and her female colleagues have claimed their right to work as equals alongside their male counterparts, doing their jobs in a way that would be unthinkable in the oppressively patriarchal culture that exists above.

For its director Feras Fayyad, The Cave is a deeply personal film, rooted in childhood memories and experiences of the humanitarian catastrophe of the Syrian war. Fayyad grew up surrounded by strong women, his mother, seven sisters and four aunts, and had always been disturbed by Syrian society’s view of women as the weaker sex, born to be wives and mothers and inherently inferior to men. One of his most vivid childhood memories is of a terrifying moment in 1990, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds, had threatened a chemical strike against Israel. “Everyone in Syria knew that if he did that, the chemicals would disperse over this country,” Fayyad recalls. “...my mom was smart enough to teach us how to put a piece of cloth around our face and try to breathe through that. As the saying goes, she didn’t give us a fish, she taught us how to fish. The image of her face, so near to my eyes, is embedded in my mind like a close-up.”

After making a film about an exiled Syrian poet, Fayyad was arrested, imprisoned and tortured for 15 months. During that time, the regime detained not only protestors but anyone perceived to be even loosely aligned with their cause. Fayyad witnessed shocking cruelty and misogyny while in prison. “One of the things that you heard all the time was the torture of women and children,” he remembers. “And women would be tortured mostly because they were women. The regime was using women as tools of war, to intimidate and attack its opponents. I came out of prison destroyed, angry. As a male growing up in a family of strong women, this was very personal for me. I felt that someday I had to use my voice as a filmmaker to speak out.”

After his release, while filming Last Men in Aleppo, Fayyad witnessed the military targeting of hospitals for revenge, intimidation and as a way of creating chaos and forcing citizens to flee. Hospitals were demolished. Medics as well as patients were killed. There were no international countermeasures to stop the barbaric attacks. It became impossible for the health sector to exist on the surface, so hospitals moved underground. "I was able to visit a number of them, and it was astonishing to witness the human ingenuity at work. These hospitals became the only hope... and they provided a place where men and women could work together. In fact, these limited underground spaces might be the only places where women can work," says Fayyad.

In August 2013, the Assad government staged a chemical attack on the opposition stronghold of Al Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus. Warheads were dropped at 2:30 a.m., choking people as they slept. One of Fayyad’s friends, a filmmaker, was able to capture the scenes in the following days as rescue workers fanned out into the streets filled with the dead and barely living. Fayyad was galvanized by the footage of two female doctors working quickly and decisively. One of them was a young paediatrician, Dr. Amani Ballour.

“It was like something out of a Hollywood movie, where you see heroes running between the bodies and trying to save lives,” Fayyad recalls, “I could picture my mom, my sisters, the women who had been beaten during my time in prison. All their stories came together in this woman, Dr. Amani, who was not just doing her duty as a doctor; she was challenging the stereotypes and prejudices that Syrian society has about women.”

He learned that Dr. Amani worked at the Cave, an underground hospital in Eastern Al Ghouta. The subterranean floors of the Cave were part of a six-story hospital construction that had been left unfinished and stood empty since the start of the Syrian rebellion. When the Assad government began stepping up its attacks on Al Ghouta in 2012, surgeon Dr. Salim Namour had the idea to open the underground portion of building as a safe place to treat patients. After the government laid siege to Al Ghouta in 2013, the Cave became one of the region’s last bastions of life-saving hope.

In The Cave, the characters rarely venture aboveground, for fear of being killed in one of the frequent airstrikes by Russian warplanes. Instead, they spend most of their lives in artificially lit rooms with their cellphones as their primary connection to the outside world. By showing the range of daily experience, from the harrowing to the mundane, the viewer connects with them as individual beings in all their complexity.

Following the women as they contend with daily bombardments, chronic supply shortages and the ever-present threat of chemical attacks, The Cave shows the women in this story as heroes, not as victims. In The Cave, female doctors stand up for themselves, which is something they couldn’t do aboveground in the patriarchal culture surrounding them. "These women are truly an inspiration to me," says Fayyad, "and I believe with this film they will inspire the world as well — contributing to breaking the silence of the outside world."

“Sister is actually a story about myself" says director Svetla Tsotsorkova, "I was seven years old when my mother sent me out to buy some bread. On my way to the bakery, I ran into some other kids and we ended up spending the money I had on cotton candy. I came home with a bag of chestnuts that one of the neighbourhood kids had given to me. I told my parents that the baker’s wife was having a baby, which is why the bakery was closed, and that I had bought the chestnuts, so that we’d have something to eat.

I was nineteen years old when I applied to the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia. I wrote a short film script about drug addicts and made it to the next round. Georgi Djulgerov, who would become my professor, asked me how I knew such details about the life of drug addicts. I told him that my parents had hired a man to drop me off and pick me up from school, and that one day I’d found him taking drugs in the bath- room of our apartment. In order to avoid having to give further explanations, I quickly added that the man had subsequently died and that I’d found him dead at the threshold of that same bathroom. And then I started crying.

I was raised by my grandmother in a village in the Strandzha Mountain in the southeastern part of Bulgaria. Our life there was boring, locked as it was between the vineyard, the vegetable garden, and taking care of the donkey. And how can you not make up stories when the daily grind itself doesn’t offer anything exciting?

Sister is a love confession for the people who live precisely such seemingly unremarkable lives. It seems to me that we all owe a debt to the truth about the kind of world we live in."

Screening at The Riverfront, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Taliesin Arts Centre during WOW Film Festival.