Women of the Rhondda: Stories On Screen
Join us for an afternoon of tea, conversation, and powerful storytelling on film.
Presented in partnership with Rhondda Arts Festival, RCT Arts and Cultural Services, and Music Theatre Wales, this community-led film event brings together powerful voices from past and present to reflect on the lives, labour and legacy of women in the Rhondda. The programme centres on collective memory, creative response, and intergenerational conversation—offering space to listen, share, and connect.
The event also includes recent work from local artist Harriet Fleuriot and Cardiff-based Umulkhayr Mohamed, who have each created short video pieces inspired by Women of the Rhondda.
After the screenings, there’ll be a chance to share your own thoughts and stories, and to chat with some of the artists and fellow audience members.
Enjoy a selection of sandwiches, cakes, and hot drinks—free with your ticket!
Presented in partnership with Music Theatre Wales and RCT Arts and Cultural Services. Women of the Rhondda (1973) is distributed by Cinenova.
Viewing advice: ‘Women of the Rhondda’ features a brief scene with full male nudity
About the Films
“The Women of the Rhondda” (1973, 20mins) by Esther Ronay, Mary Kelly, Mary Capps, Humphrey Trevelyan, Margaret Dickinson, Brigid Seagrave & Susan Shapiro, turns much-needed attention to the role played by women in the gruelling Welsh Miners’ Strikes of the 20s and 30s. It is a groundbreaking feminist documentary that uses oral history interviews with working-class women in the Rhondda, South Wales, to reveal the invisible labour that sustained mining communities. Emerging from the early Women’s Liberation Movement, the film challenges traditional depictions of work by highlighting the domestic and collective experiences of women as a foundation for political consciousness and action.
‘OF THE __________________BY ASSOCIATION’ (2023, 5mins) by Umulkhayr Mohamed is an artist moving image piece that meditates on the contemporary legacies of housewives being sidelined in miner’s strikes and the toil this takes on these women’s bodies as they contended with the conditioning of being ‘house proud’ without the resources to support your family. The work is both exploring solidarity between women and the meeting point of the domestic and the political and reflecting on the existence of oppressive hierarchies in liberatory movements, and is punctuated by calls to contemplate how our struggles are as interdependent as we are. The work was commissioned by Cinanova, as part of “The Work We Share” — a national public programme of newly digitised films from the Cinenova collection, addressing representations of gender, race, sexuality, health and community.
Interior Windows / Ffenestri Mewnol (2025, 9mins) by Harriet Fleuriot was an experimental film project that invited elder women from Harriet’s local community in the Rhondda to reflect on what “an interior life” means to them. Through voice and movement, they each share individual responses to a quietly powerful quote from Welsh artist Gwen John. The film gently holds these reflections, paying tribute to one of Gwen John’s final known works, Women in Profile, and the 1973 collective-made documentary Women of the Rhondda.
About the artists
Esther Ronay, Mary Kelly, Mary Capps, Humphrey Trevelyan, Margaret Dickinson, Brigid Seagrave, and Susan Shapiro were part of a pioneering wave of feminist and politically engaged artists in 1970s Britain. Their collaboration on Women of the Rhondda reflects a shared commitment to documenting and challenging the gendered division of labour, particularly within working-class communities.
Umulkhayr Mohamed is a Welsh Somali artist, writer, curator, and educator who produces work under the alias, Aisha Ajnabi, their ‘art other’. Her artistic practice involves primarily sound, installation, and performance work that explores the tension present between enjoying the act of wandering between emancipatory temporalities and a functional need to position oneself in the now. His art is the place where they are able to join the practicing of a spirituality rooted in animism and ancestral honouring with a politic grounded in solidarity and liberation. She sees their practice as doing the work of eroding the borders between beings to reveal the wholeness that lies beneath.
Harriet Fleuriot is an artist working across performance, film, and installation, exploring how the body performs an archive and how moving image can provide a site for re-imagining. She recently completed her role as ‘Artist-in-Service’ at Rhondda Cynon Taf Council, working alongside fellow artist Rhys Slade-Jones to explore creative exchange as a means of cultivating new models of care, visibility, and collaboration within communities. Harriet also works as a producer, editor, and mentor to other artists, as well as a workshop facilitator for wellbeing groups.