Astronauts, Vikings and
Ghosts
"The people I’d photographed came back to me
like ghosts from the past…"
In the 70's, in his hometown of Merthyr Tydfil, 19 year old photography student Robert Haines photographed his family, his friends, and sometimes just total strangers, capturing what he thought were ordinary moments in the lives of ordinary people. He took hundreds of photographs, put them in a box and forgot about them. Forty years later he rediscovered the box. Suddenly the people in the photographs didn't seem so ordinary any more. Now everybody wanted to see the images. A book and an exhibition followed. Intrigued he decided to try and find the people he'd photographed. He wanted to find out what their lived had been like. Some hadn't had the chance to grow old, but others told him about the life they'd led, since that single moment he'd recorded all those years ago.
"Everybody in them days either wanted to be an astronaut or, like the pirates on the films like, hunting for treasure. That’s what most of us wanted to do, when we were kids, but it didn’t work out that way, did it?" Paul Turner
"I was living in a city at the time called Kowloon, and then when we arrived in Merthyr I thought mmm, that’s a strange place. People would come out special after about half-past eleven. They call stop-tap then, people, you know, stop drinking after eleven and they all feel hungry after a few pints and all rush in and they just spend money, like." Ngai Yee Liu
"Looking at the photograph I guess that I must have been in the CID or at least in plain-clothes because I would never have got that hairstyle underneath a police helmet.... I used to be a detective and I’ve worked that out from the photograph...." Arwel Reed
The film looks at how, over a period of forty years, life changed for the people of Merthyr. It is a remarkable portrait of a community - poetic and elegiac, funny and touching.
It shows that, when looked at closely, no life is ordinary.
The Trailer
Filmed on a Canon 5D II
(the camera used for "House" series finale)
Running Time: 59 mins
Editor/Writer: Stuart de Jong
Director/Producer: Robert Haines
a 
production
Download the pdf Flyer here
