Aemi Presents: Roll Call
‘Roll Call’ is a programme celebrating the nine artists from the 2025-’26 edition of aemi’s Film Artist Development Programme.
Featuring work by Thomas Bennett, Aoife Carolan, Michael Dignam, Laura Fitzgerald, Uma Magal, Olivia Normile, Erik Nuding, Richie Price and Dawn Richardson, the films explore technology, transformation, nostalgia and superstition to offer new perspectives on rurality, migration and memory.
WESTLINK, Thomas Bennett, 2026, Ireland, 9 minutes
A very, very slow dance along the Westlink… WESTLINK is the second work in a trilogy of short films, each exploring movement within and around the city of Belfast. Hi8 tape slowed to the maximum; these spacious pieces developed over the course of 2025/26 are made to encourage mental wandering. For the first time, you can finally relax and marvel at Belfast’s busiest stretch of tarmac since 1981.
Lighted Ways (aemi Rough Cut), Aoife Carolan, 2026, Ireland, 10 minutes
Lighted Ways was shot in the streets close to my home in the suburbs of Bray over the five years I’ve lived there. It documents the changing streetscapes as the low pressure sodium street lamps were retrofitted with light-emitting diode (LED) lanterns. The orange light became white and the visual landscape was transformed. Something died and something was created. I have tried to find affection for my new surroundings, explored through digital and VHS footage.
The Ladder (Work in Progress), Dawn Austin, 2026, Ireland, 8 minutes
The Ladder follows the construction of a Clow ladder from Glasgow to Belfast while gradually dismantling the idea of ascent. Shot on black-and-white 16mm and incorporating British Pathé archive, this work-in-progress moves through industrial inheritance, superstition, social mobility and escape. Ladders promise that anyone can rise, yet every climb depends on stable ground, a supporting structure and, often, someone below. An ordinary object becomes a meditation on labour, ambition and interdependence.
Country Life, Laura Fitzgerald, 2026, Ireland, 12 minutes
Country Life is a short experimental film hoping to illuminate the viewer to some of the complex aspects of rural living. Combining filmed improvised scenes with an iPhone and hand drawn animated sequences, Country Life is a short film examining some aspects of living and experiencing rurality. A pseudo how-to for blown ins, persons about to move to the area, or people who would like to know more about quiet country places such as this one.
Blink, Olivia Normile, 2026, Ireland, 3 minutes
The act of blinking as edit, redaction, pulse. The eye is exposed to brief, fleeting scenes. Blink is a film that considers transformation through scale, light, and animal sight.
Sui Generis, Richie Price, 2026, Ireland, 3 minutes
The film is an abstract exploration of how our perception is infused with memory. It is inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. The film plays with the idea of involuntary memories being triggered and informing the present perception.
Ny Moana (The Mute), Erik Nuding, 2025, USA, Madagascar, France, 15 minutes
A bat-catching expedition into Madagascar's sacred caves becomes an encounter with the ancestors. Across two screens, the spirits of the caves confront the legacy of colonial conversion to Christianity, as science, indigenous knowledge and history meet in the dark. An experimental dual-channel prelude to the forthcoming feature With Their Backs to the Sky (2027).
Treading Softly in Dublin, Uma Magal, 2026, Ireland, 7 minutes
A window into a short film about a new citizen’s transformative experience of the Dublin landscape and cultural imagination featuring how Irish lore, humour-wit, myth, literature and poetry work in this regard. Combined with current social realities, immersed in the snarls, tussles, tugs and delights around reckonings with a new home country, the film aims to chew over how we find the ties that bind, abdicate either/or divides and negotiate the emotional architecture of multiple bonds and fissures.Presenting specific sites as fulcrums of meaning, wit and contradiction (the Liffey, 40 foot, Tallaght, Dublin bay) it distills these encounters to see how they coalesce/collide in dis/connecting to a new country.
Homelands (aemi Rough Cut), Michael Dignam, 2026, Ireland, 10 minutes
Homelands explores technology, spatial politics and the corporate capture of Irish youth culture. Drawing on memories of attending the Homelands electronic music festival at Mosney in 1999, the film traces changing forms of collective leisure alongside the emergence of digital technology. Archival images of mid-century holidaymakers collide with late-1990s rave footage, examining a watershed moment in the transformation of rave culture from collective experience towards mass spectacle.
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers featured in the programme.
aemi is an Arts Council funded organisation dedicated to the support and exhibition of artist and experimental film. For more information visit aemi.ie
