Parallax
Our Parallax selection is home to talented artists from all around the world who play with cinema’s technical possibilities with the curiosity, ambition and freedom of true adventurers. Selected by our programmers and our guest curators, aemi.
2024 Programme
aemi SHORTS 1: FLIGHTS FROM REASON
Curated by aemi for CIFF, Flights from Reason is a programme of new works by film artists from Ireland, France, the U.K., Poland and Sweden.
Working within a range of interconnected contexts and from a rich variety of sources the filmmakers in this programme all employ an indirect approach to their subjects, producing exciting forms of visual and sonic montage as a means of expressing unknowns, engaging with evasive figures and connecting with buried or fading histories. A complex of ideas emerges, producing entanglements where conscious and unconscious intertwine, ‘psychic knots’, as described by Joanna Stroud, that can be considered without a need for resolution.
Louis et les langues (Louis and languages)
Aurélien Froment | United Kingdom | 2023 | 22 mins
Louis, a young man treated for schizophrenia, lives with his mother and stepfather. He refuses his mother tongue, the English idiom, which is spoken by everyone around him. Inspired by Louis Wolfson’s book, Le Schizo et les langues.
Margaret (Back Translation)
Saskia Holmkvist | Sweden | 2023 | 19 mins | Fiction
Weaving together staged scenes, documentary elements and archival footage, Margaret (Back Translation) explores the recent history of Belfast by reflecting on a 2001 performance commemorating Margaret Wright, whose brutal murder took place in the city in 1994, the last (official) year of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. The film constructs its delicate narrative from absences, halting conversations, memories of secondhand experience, people who never quite appear from behind half-open doors…
Máthair
Keira Greene | United Kingdom | 2024 | 16 mins | Fiction
In 1954 an Irish woman travelled alone to England to give birth in secret in a Catholic Mother and Baby Home, she then returned to Ireland having given up the baby to the nuns. This event is the departure point for Keira Greene’s film Máthair.
Popół imieniem jest człowieka (Ashes by Name is Man)
Ewelina Rosinska | Germany | 2022 | 20 mins | Fiction
Polish filmmaker Ewelina Rosinska explores the textures and landscapes of her homeland, a place of contrasts and parallels, where Catholicism and the natural world swirl in a baroque gesture. A delicate, melancholy history weaves through the details of this poetic and poignant impression.
Different Dusts
Chloe Brenan | 2021 | Ireland | 7 minutes | Fiction
‘Different Dusts’ is a non-narrative, experimental Super 8mm film and sound work. Using the theremin (as a sensor of forces below the threshold of human perception) as a central motif, the film explores the sensing/vulnerable body, intuition, tacit knowledge, erosion and measurement against a backdrop of climate change.
THU 17 | ARC CINEMA | 13:00
aemi SHORTS 2: THE SAID AND THE UNSAID
Fiction
This eclectic programme of work shifts from an act of deliberate and playful obfuscation (3 Peonies) to a process of attempted rediscovery (In Search of the Forenaughts Longstone) to an uncovering of media artefacts that speak to both deliberate and discrete forms of creative expression in the face of state sponsored censorship (Nazarbazi and Few Can See). Together these works describe a variety of creative means of expression borne out of a necessity to speak however indirectly.
3 PEONIES
Stephanie Barber | United States | 2017 | 3 mins | Fiction
A brief, poetic 16mm film on a simple sculptural action. An experimental film in which the simplicity of the image is offset by the sonic implications. What becomes apparent is the humour possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. What begins as a reverence for natural beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field work of high modernism which, in many cases eschewed the banality of such ‘natural’ beauty. The collaged soundtrack suggests weightier concerns, gently insistent behind the flatness of the utilitarian sounds of ripping tape.
IN SEARCH OF THE FORENAUGHTS LONGSTONE
Jonathon O’Grady | Ireland | 2021 | 12 mins | Fiction
O’Grady’s film records a pilgrimage of sorts, conducted in search of a hard-to-find menhir or standing stone within the area of Naas, County Kildare. One of three in the area, the Forenaughts Longstone is located within the grounds of a large private estate, inaccessible for visitation, or indeed, view from the nearby road. The works traces the artist’s attempt to try and reach the stone on his own accord, navigating the narrow lanes and looking for openings that might allow access to the monument. In the end the journey is a failure, leading to dead-ends and obstructed views of the land. The subsequent work becomes a way of speculating about movement through the landscape; its restrictions and potential new access points. Through the use of footage, graphic and colour interludes and text, the work mediates on the privatisation of land and heritage, inaccessibility as invisibility and trespassing as a necessary tactic for cultural reclamation.
NAZARBAZI (یزابرظن)
Maryam Tafakory | Iran, United Kingdom | 2022 | 19 mins
Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema, where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited.
The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolutionary cinema, alluding to discreet forms of communication that operate within yet circumnavigate the censors. It attempts to touch the spaces we cannot touch, inner feelings/sensations, and untouchability beyond bodily experience, that of unspoken and unwritten prohibitions. The film uses poetry and silence as the only languages with which we can touch these spaces of socio-political ambiguities.
FEW CAN SEE
Frank Sweeney | Ireland | 2023 | 42 mins | Fiction
Few Can See examines the legacy of broadcast censorship of the conflict in the north of Ireland and political movements during this era. The project attempts to recreate material absent from state archives due to censorship, based on contemporary oral history interviews.
Winner of the Tiger Short Award 2024 at International Film Festival Rotterdam and received a Special Mention from the jury at the FILMADRID Awards.
SUN 17 | ARC CINEMA | 15:30
Sleep #2
Fiction, Subtitled
Andy Warhol’s debut film Sleep (1963) captured his lover John Giorno as he slept naked in bed, for more than five hours.
Radu Jude, Romania’s most reliably impertinent creative force, conceived this significantly shorter film, composed of a year’s worth of webcam footage of Warhol’s grave. A more definitive form of sleep, one could say, although the space created by the camera welcomes a whole world of life’s expressions in its patient embrace. In the words of the filmmaker, Sleep #2 means: life, death, nature, poetry, fragility, impressionism, selfies, Andy Warhol, love and kisses.
SUN 10 | ARC CINEMA | 14:00
THU 14 | ARC CINEMA | 13:45
STRANGE ABANDONED DERANGED
Fiction
The rise and catastrophic fall of Naturland Eco Park, the first eco-hotel in Turkey, unfolds in a kaleidoscopic journey through the derelict remains of the once idyllic resort.
Director Ceylan Özgün Özçelik (winner of the 2017 SXSW Gamechanger Award for her feature Inflame) presents a film which is hybrid in every way, a cast of narrators and performers perfectly encapsulating the bizarre location in its dystopian fairytale state. Both an absurd tale in itself and a reflection of Turkey’s recent history, Strange Abandoned Deranged is an eye-popping feast for adventurous eyes.
The film’s producer, Armağan Lale, will attend the screening.
SAT 9 | ARC CINEMA | 14:45
MON 11 | ARC CINEMA | 14:00
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FREE RADICALS
Experimental work from Irish and international filmmakers.
Please note: This programme contains sequences of fast flashing lights. It may affect people who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
FOXWORLD
Aoife Carolan | Ireland | 2024 | 4 mins
An encounter with a suburban fox leads to a chase through a residential landscape of gardens, driveways and bus stops; a drive to capture this wild neighbour through a lens. Foxworld explores the power dynamics of such dalliances, and raises contemporary themes of personalised content creation and environmental disruption.
THE BARREL
Katie McFadden | Ireland | 12 mins
An unnamed narrator transverses her memory of a local area, and in doing so unveils the lasting impressions of past on the landscape, her journey culminating in a particularly horrifying local myth.
DAY TRIP (IN MEMORY OF MARY BUTTERS)
Dawn Richardson | Northern Ireland | 2023 | 27 mins
Working with director Dawn Richardson, artist Jonathan Brennan and the Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive, writer Paul Doran has developed a specially-commissioned script for NI Mental Health Arts Festival (NIMHAF) about the ways in which myths are created and how they live alongside those who experience and remember their stories. Day Trip (In Memory of Mary Butters) looks at how myths are created and what they can tell us about the way our minds work.
A WOMAN OF THE DARKEST DEEDS
Chris O’Neill | Ireland | 2024 | 12 mins
An experimental short film (shot on 35mm and 16mm celluloid) which depicts a mixture of dreams, fantasies and memories shared by two different women, named Angela and Petra. We learn that the emotionally vulnerable Angela is haunted by her love for the distant Petra, who in turn has feelings for Angela and yet wants her to be out of her life. Manipulating the actions of these two characters in a manner akin to puppetry are a strange man wearing a top hat who may or may not be the devil, and an unconventional female religious figure.
NIGHT FLIGHT
Sharon Whooley | Ireland | 2023 | 17 mins
ELTONS BINS
Ian Helliwell | UK | 2024 | 3 mins
FAIRGROUND BACKGROUND
Ian Helliwell | UK | 2024 | 3 mins
SCHLIMMIGE KREISE – INPUT : REASON
Tina Frank | Austria | 2023 | 5 mins
MARE IMBRIUM
Siegfried A. Fruhauf | Austria | 2024 | 12 mins
SAT 16 | ARC CINEMA | 20:45
OLIVIA AND THE CLOUDS (OLIVIA Y LAS NUBES)
Fiction
Olivia cannot forget Ramon, and keeps his ghost under her bed. As we embark on a trip through memories of their affair, the film’s circular structure invites the audience to adopt multiple perspectives of the story, through a variety of animation styles (hand and digital drawn, cut out, claymation, stop motion and others).
Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat offers us a dizzying whirlpool of forms and colours, in which stories intertwine with each other and the narration follows the logic of dreams. And in dreams, thoughts are hungry for jumps and links and want to grasp it all.
A surreal exploration of the memory of love’s enduring power, with the premise that emotional growth is the never-ending process or learning how to live with our ghosts and befriend them.
SUN 10 | ARC CINEMA | 21:00
DROPPED FRAMES PARALLAX EMERGING FILM ARTIST
Dropped Frames is a solo exhibition by Asha Murray, recipient of the Parallax Emerging Film Artist Bursary 2024, a collaboration between CIFF, National Sculpture Factory and Sample-Studios to champion emerging film artists and moving image work.
Enter a dreamlike space of hand tufted everyday objects, sounds and film. Once inside, you are invited to sit back, relax, immerse yourself in nostalgia and select a film from Asha’s creations, reminiscent of Xtravision Friday Night evenings.
Asha Murray graduated in 2023 from The Limerick School of Art & Design, TUS with a First Class B.A. degree in Sculpture and Combined Media. She was TUS Student of the Year and was the first recipient of the TUS Travel Bursary Award. A finalist for the the RDS Visual Artist Award, her work was exhibited in the Irish Museum of Modern Art and she was subsequently awarded the one year RHA Graduate Residency prize. She was also awarded a residency with the National Sculpture Factory. Asha Murray has exhibited internationally with the Irish Embassy in the World Trade Centre in Indonesia.
The recipient of the 2025 Bursary will be announced during the Festival on Thu 14 Nov at the Triskel.
SAT 9 – SUN 30 | THE LORD MAYOR’S PAVILION | 11:00 – 16:00 | FREE | Fiction
OPEN DAILY: TUE-SAT 11:00 – 16:00
OPENING RECEPTION: 13:00 Sat 9 Nov
