With The Ballad of Wallis Island, Tom Basden and Tim Key have written a poignant and comical exploration of music, loss, nostalgia and hope.
The film has been compared to Once (2007) and Local Hero (1983), similarly low-key films that put music at the heart of quiet personal transformations. It also shares common ground with movingly situated, deliberately gently paced and panoramically shot films like The Dig (2021).
It was made in just 18 days on a tight budget in a typical Welsh summer. A doctor was on hand to stop the actors getting hypothermia when they filmed shots in the sea. Filmed in an eclectic mausoleum of an old manor house, with a charmingly decorated coat of arms in the hallway, leaky taps and socially awkward characters, it is easy to see why romcom giant Richard Curtis called it “one of the great British films of all time”.
