The Making of Maps

Endaf Emlyn's third Welsh-language feature is a not entirely successful mood-piece set on the remote Welsh coast in the Cold War early '60s. An adolescent boy (Ashcroft, good) recalls the fateful months following the disappearance of his dancer sister. In the large family house by the dunes live his ex-ballerina mother, a bedridden 'hysteric'; his munitions-worker father, 'a bad man' who may have played too free with the young charges of the family dance school; and his other sister, 'all pain and no beauty'. The boy makes maps to hide his secrets and befriends an oddball Pole with secrets of his own. The story meanders on, meditating on unseen events (an accidental death, a suicide and a rape) to the neo-classical strains of Mark Thomas's score and the noise of sea birds, but to no discernible purpose.