Sleep Furiously is set in a small farming community in mid Wales, about 50 miles north of Dylan Thomas' fictional village of Llareggub and there is a sense in which this is a film 'for' Dylan Thomas, if not a contemporary translation of 'Under Milk Wood'. This is a place where Koppel's parents - both refugees - found a home.
'Here is a voice to be cherished....wonderful...'
'Images of wistful sadness are interlaced with humour and moments of skin-prickling beauty that leave the audience undone...profoundly and unexpectedly moving' --Wendy Ide, The Times
'This delicate, tonally complex film by Gideon Koppel is a documentary love-letter to Trefeurig, the Welsh farming community in Ceredigion where he grew up, and where his parents found refuge from Nazi Germany during the second world war. It is a rural society, outwardly placid and at one with a landscape of stunning beauty, but in fact in crisis. Koppel's film takes as its starting point the closure of the local school, a definitive, calamitous loss for a place where shops and bus services have already vanished. The movie pays tribute to the grit of a people who may yet revive their economy, but it acknowledges a darker possibility, for which the sentimental note of an "elegy" is not appropriate. Slowly, but surely, Trefeurig appears to be dying, and Koppel's camera captures the consequent ripples of loss and regret.'