Prologue

Prologue

On cinema, patience, and learning to see.

The tricycle wheels clip clapper as they traverse the deep blue carpet. Turn after turn, the tension building. Then one more fatal turn and there they are, the twins in their milky blue dresses. 'Come and play with me'. Danny covers his eyes as the music reaches a fever pitch.

Then the front door opens and Cai quickly ejects the unmarked VHS from the video player before his father realises what he's been watching.

Wales, 1986 — Cai, age 6

It's 1986. Cai is 6 years old — and this is where his love of cinema begins. A door, once opened, that would never quite close. Born in 1980, he was raised on a diet of Kung Fu films and genre pictures rented from the local video shop — no Blockbuster, just a grumbling local who would rent whatever to whoever. By age 16 he had consumed hundreds, possibly thousands of films.

What drew him in wasn't any single genre, but the power of the image itself — the way a filmmaker could build a world, sustain a feeling, make time move differently. Cinema, at its best, is the most immersive and empathetic of all art forms. Low-budget work in particular fascinated him: free of the pressures that come with high budgets, filmmakers were forced to dig deep into their creative souls, which often yielded remarkable results.

After graduating as an actor from one of the UK's leading drama schools, Cai moved to London where he worked in TV, film, theatre, and voiceover. In his downtime he practically lived at the cinema, taking full advantage of his unlimited cinema pass. It was during this time that he discovered Jia Zhangke — and from there, a whole new world opened up. Tarkovsky. Ozū. Béla Tarr. Reichardt. Slow, contemplative cinema that trusted the audience to feel rather than be told.

Not spectacle, but presence. Not plot, but time. Cinema as a way of paying attention to the world.

These influences sit alongside his early love of genre work — and rather than choosing between them, Cai found his own voice somewhere in that tension. The rigour of slow cinema. The instinct and energy of genre filmmaking. A single, unified way of seeing.

His first camera was a used Yashica 35, passed on to him by his father in childhood. Shooting on film at an early age taught him patience — to wait for the right moment rather than manufacture one. That instinct has never left him. He uses post-production sparingly, preferring to capture what he can in the moment, allowing the apparent flaws to add texture and meaning to the image.