TY  - BOOK
AU  - Dafydd Sills-Jones
AU  - Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones
PY  - 2021
CY  - Oxford, United Kingdom
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 2504-4834
SN  - 9781788745345
TI  - Documentary in Wales
T2  - Cultures and Practices
DO  - 10.3726/b14248
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1057199
N2  - Documentary, in a small, bilingual nation such as Wales, experiences many of the same challenges that it faces across the world. As the costs of professional documentary production lessen, and the potentialities of internet distribution loosen the grip of its traditional tele-cinematic gatekeepers, documentary production communities face both the potential of new distribution avenues and severe professional precarity. In Wales, the dynamics of this transformation unfolds according to a specific historical, political and cultural situation. With funding, regulatory frameworks, audience taste, viewing figures, and contractual territories all mostly emanating or controlled from across the border in England, at times it is difficult to identify texts that can and can’t be claimed as «Welsh». But then again, contingency and struggle have always been fundamental aspects of Welsh cultural identity. What emerges is not so much the documentary culture of a small nation, but a documentary culture that is still struggling to come to terms with itself, giving Welsh documentary a character defined by a specific set of features: the political and cultural interplay of two languages, a continuation of older British public service broadcasting traditions, the acceptance of the marginal, the close interconnectedness of key players and the often paralysing effect of underfunding.
KW  - Documentary production, Small Nation Cinemas, UK media, minority language media
LA  - English
ER  -