Coming Up Roses – 1986 | 93 mins | Comedy | Colour

Plot Synopsis

An engaging and offbeat comedy, Coming Up Roses shows the unflagging optimism and energy of a small community in Thatcher’s Britain in the midst of social gloom and unemployment. This Welsh language film with English subtitles recalls Bill Forsyth’s human comedies and Peter Sellers’ The Smallest Show on Earth (1957) but rather than save their cinema these Welsh entrepreneurs find an alternative use. After making Coming Up Roses, director Stephen Bayly and others bought the real Rex cinema featured in the film. Sadly the cinema was demolished in 1990 to make way for a car park.

After fifty years of double features, matinees, newsreels, coming attractions and black-and-white horrors, the majestic Rex Theatre in the small Welsh mining town of Aberdare is abruptly closed. But when former projectionist now caretaker Trev’s (Dafydd Hywel) ex-wife needs £700, he borrows the ailing manager Eli’s (W.J. Phillips) funeral money and is subsequently faced with the problem of how to pay it back when Eli falls ill. The dilapidated cinema is dark and damp, so Trev hits upon the novel idea of growing mushrooms in the auditorium to solve his financial shortage. All seems to be going swimmingly until the town councillors decide to pay a surprise visit.