When the renown Swedish film director Kjell-Ake Andersson was a young man, he visited South Wales in 1973 on a photographic expedition. Travelling on a shoestring, with his girlfriend and eight-month-old daughter Matilda he was taken in a miner’s home in Bargoed. They stayed together in the village for three months, meeting and talking and taking photographs. returning twice in the following year. Widely accepted by the miners and their families, his photographs portrayed their lives in intimate detail. His book, Gruvarbetare in Wales, was published in Sweden in 1977 with an accompanying Swedish text by Mikael Wistrom, While unknown to many, this has become recognised as one of the most perceptive visual accounts of mining life in that period. In 1984 he made an added contribution. By this time established in film making, he returned to the eastern valleys to make a documentary, Breaking Point, on the 1984-85 strike at Oakdale for ITV Cymru. Today Andersson often looks back to the time he arrived at Bargoed and recalls ‘meeting the mining community has made a great impact in my life. The generosity and solidarity and friendship I have never forgotten’.