Projects matching: Martin Duffy

Synopsis

When Tal Jones' mother leaves home to live with her hairdresser, the 12-year-old boy is left to deal with his uncommunicative father (Jonathan Pryce) and bitter older brother (Matthew Rhys), as well as all the other problems of growing up in a Welsh farming community, such as bullying, piano lessons and warts.



The Testimony Of Taliesin Jones takes an unexpected turn, when Tal finds out his elderly piano teacher Billy Evans (Ian Bannen, in one of his last roles before his death last year) is a faith healer. Billy heals Tal's warts, inspiring him to form his own gang, the Believers, who land in trouble when they try to cure a school mate with diabetes. The result is a story about God, belief and miracles.



Based on Welsh writer Rhidian Brook's first novel, which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1997 and was shortlisted for Welsh Novel of the Year, the material had particular appeal for director Martin Duffy, who had worked with healer Finbarr Nolan on his autobiography Seventh Son Of A



Seventh Son.



Unknown actor John-Paul Macleod was chosen from hundreds of hopefuls for the title role.



Duffy's first feature, The Boy From Mercury, won several awards, including three of the main prizes at the Giffoni children's film festival in Italy. His next film is The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, starring Elijah Wood and Janeane Garofalo. The Testimony Of Taliesin Jones had its first screening in the Cannes market in May.

Synopsis

To eleven year old Taliesin Jones, God is as palpable as the apple he buys on his way to school, as real as the rain which trickles down his neck, as near as the warts on his fingertips. In Cqmglum where he lives on a farm in rural Wales, God is all around, even at school where Hoop The Mental hits him on the nose, and earthy Julie Dyer blows confusing smoke rings at him.


Others don't see the world the way he does. When his mother leaves home with her hairdresser to put more colour in her life, Taliesin is left behind with his distracted father, sullenly adolescent brother and his own creeping uncertainty to try and make sense of this sudden conspiracy of events. It is only with elderly Billy Evans, piano teacher and part time healer that Taliesin finds a source of miracles, miracles which transform his life . . .


The Testimony of Taliesin Jones is a beautifully measured story exploring the troubled borderland between childhood and adolescence. Poetic, precisely observed and filled with humour, it examines the resources of imagination and faith to which children can turn when faced with the confusion and imperfection of the adult world they are about to enter.