“Do you ever have the mad dream that one quiet afternoon there is a knock on the door and the Queen is standing there, wanting to use the loo and have a cup of tea? The lane is full of her cars and guards but she just wants to sit down and have a chat with ‘normal’ people! It felt like that with the film festival-one day the village was full of friendly strangers who want to have tea, perhaps use the loo, find out what you do! And all the time they are walking along the line of the village road, redefining it in the pace of their walk, ‘making it again’. What I liked so much was the way these classy films were dancing away in parlours and bedrooms, studios and pubs as if this was all quite normal, how the world should be! What fun! More seriously it was so stimulating to see the way each film makers perceptions about the world added to the framework and life of the village- no one can see the walk along the village road with all its change and intricacies, rise and flow of the horizon line, tilt and drop of gradient, high hedge and secret birdsong, voices  from hidden gardens, smoke and crackle of bonfire, child’s cry….in the same way after those films and Siobhan’s opening presentation. There was a quiet passion in the way the visitors experienced the whole event, an attentiveness that was a delight. Films from abroad (the dance from Brazil!)  seemed to fit and be part of the same ‘family’ of experiences from the local talent. Perhaps that is a product of globalisation, now as a cultural experience. Or perhaps because we are all human and need to continually explore and reinvent the world as a shared experience. I also enjoyed the nature of relating the body, films to our landscape. When I look out of my studio window I always see my sculptures and the way they stand as part of the landscape, the valley and Cych. And its not just the leaves.  Walking the road, the walk in Siobhan’s film, seemed all of a piece with what I’m doing, what the sculptures do as they stand on their own horizon line. What is within and what is without becomes such a fine tuned thing, a hum. I prayed for the sun to come out and warm up the visitors but it seemed tea did the job!”

– Steve Duncan on the ‘Bodies in Land Film Festival’ 2014

“More than a festival of films about dance, this was a festival of place and film and people and dancing, so there was a weaving together of the tawny owl and the Polish man who gave me a lift though I wasn’t lost and seeing Eddie Ladd baptised over and over again in the lounge bar and the trips up to the mansion and the irony and the poetry of the spaces staying the same and not and the faces staying the same and not and the light staying the same and not and the politics of that and the immediacy and chains of vernacular dancing and shouting and filling in the gaps of unheard calling and the reforming of the circles and pairs as someone tripping and falling is drawn back into it all like the drawing back into something that was never there before in Siobhan Davies and David Hinton’s film and y barcud coch and being frightened by yet another massive dog in a narrow lane, navigating badly farm to farm, flagging down a van, Tyhir, Shiral, Pengwern, and the crazy colour of the bird’s blood in Sue Palmer’s short film and Eddie Ladd still rising again and again from the water and the water released repeatedly to run away and to meet and to re-meet and to eat the fruits of foraging and to say goodbye, goodbye.”

– Phil Smith on the ‘Bodies in Land Film Festival’ 2014