• Féile Na Gréine Announce Film About Limerick Artists in Lockdown

    2019 saw the inaugural Féile Na Gréine, a three-day, not-for-profit music trail taking place across Limerick. With no choice but to cancel last year’s outing, and a return this year still up in the air, organisers have announced details of a new film titled Out of Place. Posting on social media, organisers said, “We’re happy to announce that we’ve been working on a film. We spent 2020 documenting a number of artists from Limerick, and exploring the connection between music, space, and community. More to share in the coming months.” Among the artists to feature in the film are Narolane’s Denise…

  • Q&A With Andy & Ryan Tohill, Directors of The Dig

    Digging up the past is dirty business. Northern Irish indie The Dig, the first feature from brothers Andy and Ryan Tohill, brings viewers out to the bog, for a grubby, mucky, effective drama of guilt and redemption. Written by Stuart Drennan and assisted by NI Screen, the film stars Moe Dunford as Ronan Callahan, a convicted murderer with a memory problem who returns to his small Irish village and finds the father of his apparent victim (Lorcan Cranitch) on an obsessive quest to unearth his daughter’s body. Flagged by Emily Taafe as the victim’s sister, and Francis Magee as a menacing Sergeant, the repentant Ronan picks…

  • Watch: VerseChorusVerse – INTRO (A Bandwidth Film)

    2018 was a busy year from Belfast-based jack of all trades (and master of many) Tony Wright aka VerseChorusVerse. As well as publishing his first book, the North coast musician, solo artist and ex-guitarist/founding member of And So I Watch You From Afar was made an artist-in-residence at the MAC. During that time, Will McConnell of Bandwidth popped by to capture Wright in his element. The result is INTRO, a candid, 22-minute film that hones in on the nuance and heart of Wright’s craft via stripped-back performance, improvised guitar sounds and snippets from the aforementioned first book. Framed by the…

  • ‘That Is Horror Already’: Aislinn Clarke on Magdalene Laundry Frightener The Devil’s Doorway

    Earlier this year, the announcement of The Conjuring spin-off The Nun prompted movie site ledes about how scary nuns are the new scary clowns. But for Irish readers, Mother Superior’s terrors are nothing new. The trauma of the Magdalene Laundries — the island-wide network of religious asylums where vulnerable and ‘wayward’ women were imprisoned and forced to provide unpaid labour —lingers in Irish cultural memory. Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) is the most well-known dramatisation of life in the institutions — the last of which closed in Belfast in only 1996 — but is being joined by new genre work. Premiering this week in New York…

  • Delirious Rhythm, 1936 – 2017 @ IFI

    This week is the last to see the dual-exhibitions featuring the works of Vivienne Dick and Nan Goldin in IMMA. To coincide, aemi are presenting Delirious Rhythm 1936-2017, a personal selection of films that have influenced and inspired Dick’s oeuvre. The film will be shown in the IFI, with this one off event beginning at 6:30pm tomorrow. Artists whose works have been selected include Helen Levitt, D.A. Pennebaker, Len Lye, Sarah Pucill and Chantal Akerman, with the films chosen relating to ‘the street, the domestic and the unconscious.’  Dick will introduce the performance, with full details on the featured films available online here. Her 93% Stardust exhibition, and Goldin’s corresponding Weekend…

  • Exhibition: Subjects & Objects @ VISUAL Carlow

    Frank Kafka’s 1922 short story, A Hunger Artist, provides the departure point for American filmmaker Daria Martin’s latest film, also titled A Hunger Artist. In Kafka’s story an artist performs public fasts, which are fashionable at the time, but feeling under-loved and under-appreciated he tries to extend the length of time he subjects himself to these performances against his managers wishes. After fasting falls out of fashion he finds himself working in a circus; and in the end he neither desires food nor attention, becoming ignored. Eventually he dies and is replaced by a panther, who is gazed upon and admired by his…

  • Exhibition: The Last Wilderness @ The Dock

    The Last Wilderness is the current exhibition in Carrick-on-Shannon’s The Dock, and features the work of Cecilia Danell. The show is an expansion of a body of work shown by Danell earlier this year in Galway’s Art Centre. In this version of the work, the artist’s landscape paintings, which draw on her native Sweden and its neighbour Norway where she recently completed a residency, are recontextualised to reference Danell’s interests in film, theatre and performance based art. These interests see the artist present an experimental film shot on 8mm alongside her work – the piece is is screened from a small theatre set constructed as…

  • Looking at the Stars: Slum Cinema

    After several years of transience and venue shifting, Dublin B-movie night Slum Cinema has found a new home at MVP on Clanbrassil Street, and kick starts its residency at the start of next month with the greatest martial arts movie of them all, Bruce Lee’s final performance, 1973’s Enter The Dragon. Started in 2012, Slum Cinema is the passion project of Canadian Anna Davies, but it’s ripe to be elevated to cult classic status if its new stint at MVP goes as well as it deserves. As described by its founder, Slum Cinema is an exploitation/vintage/trash/cult cinema club. Its previous…

  • Exhibition: Showing Off @ VOID

    This week is the last to see Showing Off in Derry’s Void gallery. The show, which has been curated by Mhairi Sutherland, has seen screenings from the New York initiative Women Make Movies’ archive. Void’s Gallery 2 has a rotation of feature film’s, with a fixed series of shorter films in the gallery’s other spaces. For this final week it’s Barbara Miller’s 2012 film Forbidden Voices: How to Start a Revolution with a Computer – which looks at female bloggers in Cuba, China and Iran as they document their countries’ regimes. This film will be shown daily at 11am and 1pm, with the shorter films, including…

  • Picture This Special: PLASTIK Festival

    Returning for its sophomore edition to Dublin this weekend is the PLASTIK Festival of Artists’ Moving Image. Due to run Friday 24th to Sunday 26th, the festival is a collaboration between LUX, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and the IFI. The latter provides the setting for the weekend’s film screenings, which see a number of artists, including Yuri Pattison, aemi and Sasha Litvintseva, present bodies of work that influence their outputs, while others are showcasing current or forthcoming work. The festival begins on Friday at 6:30pm with Abyss Film in the IFI, curated by James Richards. This is followed by Richards and LUX…