CineSalon Experimental Film Festival is a new festival taking place in Cork City, Ireland and online.
It celebrates personal, poetic and formally experimental filmmaking from across the world, providing a platform for film artists to share and discuss their work with adventurous audiences in a relaxed atmosphere. Curated by filmmakers, this defiantly independent festival exists to showcase the wild reeds of visionary film that ignore accepted cinematic paradigms and are all the more inspiring for it.
Image Credit: Benjamin Burns, based on a photo by Luíse O’Donovan
CineSalon 2024 will present a rich programme of shorts, features, talks and live events both in person and online. The full programme will be announced soon, but in the meantime keep an eye on our news page and Instagram for regular updates.
This festival grew out of CineSalon, a quarterly experimental film screening event that has taken place at The Guesthouse Project, Cork since June 2023.
CineSalon gratefully acknowledges its venue partners:
The CineSalon Team:
Maximilian Le Cain
Maximilian Le Cain has created a prolific and acclaimed body of moving image work including features, shorts, installations and film-related performances. He was The Arts Council / UCC (University College Cork) Film Artist in Residence for 2023. His most recent feature Solitaire premiered at Cork International Film Festival in 2023. Other recent works include Daughter of the Sun (2021), a short based on the Irish legend of the Cailleach Beara, and Blissed (2022) an erotic feature film heralded for pushing the envelope of Irish cinema. His filmmaking proposes a personal relationship with cinema as a site of haunting. Le Cain is affiliated with the influential Experimental Film Society (EFS), an autonomous entity designed for producing cinema through experimentation. He is also known for his collaborations with Vicky Langan which created an intimate but unsettling personal universe in film and performance across more than a decade.
Benjamin Burns
Benjamin Burns is an experimental filmmaker, sound artist, performer, and poet from Sligo, who is based in Cork City. His work often engages with the non-human, reaching out towards or adopting the perspectives of animals, plant-life, and physical materials. Recent film works include: The Portal (2022) a haunting ecological short which explores bat echolocation and insect vision, The Black Umbrella (2022) a poetic horror short, and Pied Wagtail (2021) a non-narrative nature documentary. He also works as a freelance audiovisual artist for film and theatre.
Benjamin was joint-winner of the All-Ireland Poetry Slam 2016, going on to represent Ireland in the 2017 European Poetry Slam in Brussels. He is a board member and regular emcee of the poetry event Ó’Bhéal. He is also a member of the noise-art band Exotic Bùcket. Benjamin has a H. Dip in Montessori Education, and spent five years working as a pre-school teacher. In 2022 he completed an M.Phil. in Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin, undertaking research on audio-visual counterpoint in experimental film.
Shells Le Cain
Shells Le Cain (Shelly Sarah Kamiel) is a filmmaker who has recently relocated to Cork from the Big Apple. Her dark, wryly humorous films invite viewers into an intense personal vision that is as unsettling as it is visually enticing. They unfold like shamanic trances with Kamiel as the solitary central figure conjuring visions that dissolve memory, dream and reality into a lyrical, often psychedelic phantasmagoria. For all their kaleidoscopic beauty, they are imbued with a deep fragility and shot through with a haunting current of bewildered melancholy. She is following up a recent short film trilogy made up of Rinse: Repeat (2018), Blood in the Butter (2019) and Supernova Cash Out (2020) with her first feature, Ghost Dust (2024), which will premiere at CineSalon. She studied film at the film conservatory at SUNY Purchase and has worked in post-production for over a decade in New York.