VERY ANNIE MARY

Year: 2000
USA: Empire Pictures
UK: FilmFour
Cast: Rachel Griffiths, Jonathan Pryce, Ioan Gruffudd, Matthew Rhys, Rhys Miles Thomas, Colin Thomas, Ruth Madoc, Kenneth Griffith, Josh Richards, Joanna Page, Grafton Radcliffe, Michele McTernan, Lynn Hunter, Donna Edwards, Melissa Vincent, Rachel Isaac, Ray Gravell, Llyr Evans
Director: Sara Sugarman
Country: UK
USA: 105 mins
UK: 104 mins
UK Certificate: 15 for some strong language and single instance of moderate sex
USA Release Date: 29 March 2002 (Limited Release - Los Angeles and New York)
UK Release Date: 25 May 2001

Synopsis

As a teenager, Annie-Mary won the most prestigious singing competition in Wales but her mother was ill and she wasn't allowed to take her scholarship to study in Milan. In fact, she never left Ogw at all. Now, fifteen years later, awkward and unloved, she is still living at home with her widowed father. No one remembers Annie-Mary's beautiful voice but all the local ladies sing the praises of her womanising, silver tongued father, the village baker and locally renowned tenor known as "The Voice of the Valleys".

Although her father treats her like a child, Annie-Mary's rebellion has never progressed beyond smoking in secret and an occasional flutter on the horses. In her wilder moments, she daydreams about Colin, the only attractive man under 60 in the valley. Colin won't give her the time of day and undeterred, Annie-Mary shares her fantasies with her best and only friend, 16 year-old Bethan Bevan, who is confined by illness to her bed.

When her father has a stroke, Annie-Mary imagines for one glorious moment that her life will begin at last. She'll sell the bakery and put a deposit on her dream house. Release is, unfortunately, short-lived: her father survives and returns home in a wheelchair, more cantankerous and demanding than ever.

All of her savings have gone to pay the bills, and Annie-Mary's dream house seems like a far distant dream, so she sets to work at the bakery, making increasingly disastrous, but comical, attempts to turn out the perfect loaves her father is famous for. While her domestic frustrations mount, the village begins to buzz with a new project: the Mayor of Ogw has decided to raise money to send Bethan Bevan to Disneyland.

Annie-Mary's attempts to help raise money for Bethan go disastrously wrong and it takes a series of calamities with unexpected silver linings before Annie-Mary can finally stand up and claim her freedom.