Having forged successful careers in different areas of the entertainments business brother and sister Louis and Izzy Fonseca have collaborated on a feature film shot on location near their family home in Llangattock Lingoed.

‘The Great Unwashed’, which premieres at Cardiff Independent Film Festival on Saturday (May 6, 7.15pm), is a comedy about a hapless twenty-something who is forced to flee the city and hide out with a tribe of hippies after witnessing a brutal murder by a gang of criminal hairdressers.

Louis Fonseca, who directed the 84-minute feature, was a regular on the live comedy circuit for several years and took several shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

That experience, he says, has given him a good knowledge of comedians and comic actors who are near the start of their careers but are very talented.

“It was a privilege to effectively handpick my favourite acts from the live circuit and put them in a movie,” he said.

He also found that working with his sister had its advantages.

“You bypass a lot of the emotional stuff you have to navigate with other colleagues, and you can speak your mind,” he explained.

“Best of all, your sister always has to forgive you because at the end of the day, you’re still family.

“The only thing I remember arguing about was during one scene I wanted to break a character’s glasses, Izzy said I couldn’t do it because the glasses were going to be returned to the shop! It was one of the last days of shooting and we had no money left!

“We were lucky enough on this project to get a great cast and crew who were prepared to pitch in for very little. We knew almost everyone in it before we started, anyone we didn’t know either came from ‘shooting people’ (a website that brings filmmakers together), or via friends.

“This meant there was a great energy on set, no-one minded working late or starting early (or both), and as we were a small crew we were able to move very quickly.

“We shot almost all of the film on two cameras, which helps capture small comic moments that might be missed on a one camera shoot and allowed us to cover more script pages every day.

“We shot most of the film around my parents’ farm near Abergavenny. The richness of the natural environment there is incredible. One of the film’s main themes is the escape from city to country, which reflects my own feelings.

“I’ve been living in London for a few years, but get out of the city and back to Wales whenever I can.

“We had the entire cast and crew staying either at my parents’ farm or with neighbours. We emptied out one of the barns and turned it into a canteen, my mum did most of the catering (along with some of the neighbours) and we had our wrap party in the village pub.

“We barely slept but we managed to get a film in the can in two weeks - and we did a lot of laughing along the way!”

Izzy agrees that filming on location in the area where they grew up was great fun.

“When I read the script I was struck by two things: my brother has a very silly sense of humour and while being an incredibly silly film, there is also an underlying and very familiar tale: the boomerang generation, struggle to get work, not being able to afford city living and having to move home.

“It was very much a community project with neighbours putting actors up in their homes and cooking meals for the crew.

“Our tree surgeon neighbour, Jim, even advised us on which trees would be strong enough to hang someone upside down from! And the Hunters Moon pub in Llangattock Lingoed let us use it as a location.”

Izzy and Louis both attended Llantilio Pertholey Primary School before going to secondary school in Hereford.

“While we both live in London currently, the end goal is to move back. The Welsh film industry is expanding and we hope to be part of that. We’re planning on shooting our next project in Wales too,” she said.

Izzy has a background in TV having come up through the ranks on ‘Masterchef’ for Shine TV. She has since produced one off documentaries for Channel 4 and the BBC as well as long running series’ like ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’.

Louis was DoP on Bafta Cymru winning feature ‘Risen: The Howard Winstone Phenomenon’ and ‘The Feral Generation ‘ winner of Best UK Feature at the Swansea Life Film Festival. As a director he won the Audience Award at the 2011 Cofilmic Comedy Film Festival for his short ‘Dwain Chambers: Life Guru’ which was picked up by BBC3 as a three part online series.

He has also directed many online commercials for clients including Burger King, Petplan and Zurich and has been running comedy YouTube channel Hot Broth Comedy since 2013.

He met Nick Horseman at University in Cardiff. They’ve been writing and performing together since 2004 and first took to the stage as a musical act in 2005.

Their first stand-up gig followed in 2008 and they performed regularly on the live comedy circuit for five years. They were semi-finalists of the BBC New Comedy Awards 2011 and finalists of the Welsh Stand-Up Award 2012 and UK Musical Comedy Awards 2011. The Great Unwashed is their first feature screenplay.