MetFilm has just released the trailer for director Marc Evans‘s Welsh-language drama, EFFI O BLAENAU, adapted from the Gary Owen melodrama play Iphigenia in Splott, written in 2015 and first performed in 2016 at the Lyric Hammersmith. The film, which oversaw a Glasgow Film Festival premiere in early 2026, features newcomer Leisa Gwenllian as protagonist Effi, “a young woman desperate to escape a town where the pubs are closed, the jobs have vanished, and her grandmother works night shifts in the local chip shop just to get by.”
“A chance encounter in a Llandudno nightclub with injured soldier Lee briefly opens a door to something better,” the synopsis continues. “For a moment, Effi glimpses a life she never imagined — but the reality that follows is far tougher.”
EFFI O BLAENAU also stars Suspicion’s Tom Rhys Harries, also set to appear as the titular character in the DCU adaptation of the Clayface comics, and Gavin Lee Lewis.
The film will show Effi take on the social and emotional role of a single mother in a social system which inhibits and judges her, exposing societal ills against women and the underprivileged. Arifa Akbar’s five-star Guardian review of the original, one-woman play cites the work’s thematic groundwork as “full of paradoxes: a monologue constrained by singularity through its form, which feels peopled by an entire town. And an epic tragedy captured by a white working-class woman with no hint of Vicky Pollard-style satirising despite her scraped-back hair, snarls and street brawls.”
Akbar also writes the protagonist “…eminently ordinary but exceptional in her heroism, too.”
EFFI O BLAENAU comes to UK cinemas on 19th June.
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