Steel: The Blood of Us (2026)
Every so often a documentary comes along that captures a world just as it is about to disappear, and Steel: The Blood of Us, Joe Cornick's film about Port Talbot, is a fine and quietly moving example. Billed as a cinematic love letter to the end of the industrial revolution, it does exactly what that promises, and it earns a strong three and a half stars from me as a really well made and genuinely affecting piece of work.
Shot evocatively on 16mm, the film sets out to capture the community of Port Talbot in the final years of traditional steelmaking, with the town's steelworks facing the end of an era. What makes it land so powerfully is how personal Cornick keeps it. Rather than reaching for statistics or policy, he roots the whole thing in the lived experience of the people there, and I found it extremely interesting to sit with a local South Wales family and understand what the works nearby actually means to them.
Because this is the real revelation of the film, just how total the relationship between the town and the steel is. Pretty much the entire family, parents, grandparents, the lot, work in some capacity for the mill, and the works is not simply a place of employment but the very centre of their lives. They fraternise through it, they play sport together through it, it is the engine of an entire community, and Cornick captures that interconnectedness with real warmth. When you understand how deeply the steel runs through these people, the title stops being a flourish and starts to feel like plain truth.
Structurally it does what the best of these films do, weaving together footage of the steelworks themselves, all molten glow and sparks and industrial scale, with interviews drawn from across the region, so that the voices of different generations build into a single collective portrait. The 16mm photography gives the whole thing a tactile, almost elegiac quality that suits its subject perfectly, and Benjamin Doherty's score underscores the sense of something precious slipping away.
Three and a half stars. Steel: The Blood of Us is a really good documentary, made with obvious care and love for its subject, and it succeeds in doing the most important thing a film like this can do, preserving a way of life right at the moment it stands on the brink of vanishing. If you have any feeling at all for Welsh industry, working communities, or simply beautifully crafted non-fiction cinema, this is well worth seeking out.
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