In-Person Programme

CineSalon Experimental Film Festival is a new festival celebrating personal, poetic and formally experimental filmmaking.

It presents an in-person programme of screenings and events in Cork City, Ireland (September 13th – 15th) and an extensive online screening programme worldwide (September 14th – 27th).

In-Person Programme:

Friday September 13th

CineSalon: Live & Opulent on Friday 13th

7.30pm Plugd Records

3 Cornmarket St, Centre, Cork, T12 X9Y9

Tickets €12 - for sale now on Eventbrite

The inaugural CineSalon Experimental Film Festival kicks off with an evening of live film performances at Plugd Records. Come celebrate Friday the 13th with us and witness cinema expand in every conceivable direction!

Shells Le Cain & Mick O’Shea: Disruptive Coloration

Shells Le Cain and Mick O’Shea perform a live soundtrack to Disruptive Coloration, a new experimental film by Le Cain that hypnotically weaves visions and memories.

Shells Le Cain (Shelly Kamiel) is a filmmaker whose films project an intense personal vision which is as unsettling as it is visually enticing. They unfold like shamanic trances marked by a kaleidoscopic beauty. Mick O’Shea has been instrumental in establishing a vibrant and growing sound art scene in Cork City. All of his works spring from his essential experience in drawing. His mediums include sculpture, drawing, sound and cooking.

Vicki Davis: Mettle

Mettle has been composed using a combination of digitally documented performative videos by Vicki Davis. By implementing various sound elements and field samples Mettle is an exploratory piece where the artists plays with the idea of breaking the fourth wall by combining film alongside real live performance. Inspired by the benefits that physical activity has on the brain Vicki juxtaposes scenes of distress over architectural sites known for their ability to create well-being and she takes references from Julia Cameron's book The Artists Way to create a positive text montage along with voice samples of Dr.Wendy Suzuki's online interview with Huberman Lab where she talks about building a brain barrier through physical activity.

Written, directed and performed by Vicki Davis

Camera by Vicki Davis, Etaoin Melville, Harry Moore

Editing by Rob Noonan

Piano score by Andy Ingamells

Original Electronic score by Jamie Behan

Neglected Ambient Shirts Vol 1 "I Imagine My Brain Imagining Itself Imagining Itself" courtesy of Arthur Itis

Vicki Davis is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance art, film, sculptural installation and experimental sound.

Benjamin Burns: Only The Sky Has No Answer

This off-kilter work of sonar theatre explores bat subjectivity, echolocation as vision, and the possibility of human-bat transformation. Expanded cinema that swoops between footage and field-recordings of bats in flight, to scantily-clad exaggerations of bat-people as they are culturally imagined. Featuring live performance by Benjamin Burns, Anastasiia Kiriienko, Vicki Davis, Shells Le Cain, and Andy Ingamells.

Benjamin Burns is an experimental filmmaker, sound artist, performer, and poet. His work often engages with the non-human, reaching out towards or adopting the perspectives of animals, plant-life, and physical materials. Anastasiia Kiriienko is a photographer, visual artist, and singer from Ukraine. Andy Ingamells is an experimental musician who develops unusual methods of composition that blur the line between composer and performer.

Saturday September 14th

A day of screenings at The Guesthouse

10 Chapel St, Shandon, Cork

These events are free and unticketed but seats are strictly limited. Please come early to avoid disappointment.

Guesthouse Collective presents an expanded cinema performance: no me - 2pm

“Our environment is a complex of frequencies and angles. Our environment is a complex of different frequencies of impingement — from within and without — upon the individual "me-nesses." - R. Buckminster Fuller

Here, a cinematic environment, full of human performers together with their cybernetic assistants and perhaps companions from other living species.

Everything here, audible and inaudible, visible and invisible, from the geological, the physical, the living, to the massless, the thought, the possible, the counterfactual, and the impossible, everything composes the situation, sympoietically; containing moments of sufficient completion to be self-maintaining, while preserving a radical openness toward further continuous transformation.

CineSalon Open Call Short Films Programme 1 - 3.30pm

A programme combining short films by Cork- and Ireland-based artists with a selection from the best of CineSalon’s international short film programme.

Blue Skin (Garance Rigoni / Manon Tagand)

On the Roof of a Skyscraper (Catherine Harty)

Silent Voices (Etaoin Melville)

From the Tunnel of Faded Memory (Chris O’Neill)

Holes (Helen Horgan)

Cumha (Elena Horgan)

Minutes (Matthew Walkow)

Orchestra of Disquiet (Mihai Costachescu, Andy Ingamells, Aoife King, Colette Lewis, Olivia Mihet, Collette Nolan, Ailbhe Reilly Tuite, Yordanka Tegarkova)

Yoga Scratch (Harry Moore)

Fuck My Black Holes, They Are Bottomless (Darja-Kazimira Zimina)

everything is ok | an ASMR to help you sleep at night (Autojektor)

CineSalon Artist in Focus: Arran Tenzin Bradstock - 5.15pm

A screening of films by Arran Tenzin Bradstock followed by a discussion with the filmmaker. Arran Bradstock is a filmmaker and musician from Cork whose experimental approaches to filmmaking treat sounds and images as independent equals, and embrace unknowable results through randomised processes and improvisation. The resulting works are immersive and hypnotic, evoking surprisingly dreamlike states through their visually intense collaging of details of reality.

November 2022

[sync] I

[sync] II

Dice Roll

FRAMERATES

XENOBLAST

Film Album no.1 [Track 07]

CineSalon Open Call Short Films Programme 2 - 6.50pm

A second programme combining short films by Cork- and Ireland-based artists with a selection from the best of CineSalon’s international short film programme.

A Sense of Nothing (Francisco Rojas)

Promises of Sight (Asha Murray)

UNTITLED (love) (Lucia Dwyer)

Keratin (Charles Jimenez)

absence I presence (Christina Bennet)

Exterior Turbulence (Sofia Theodore-Pierce)

Indurance (Vicki Davis)

I Drift Like a Wave on the Ocean (Katie Gerardine O’Neill)

Cosmic Rage (Emilia Izquierdo)

Ex Animo (Ciana Fitzgerald)

Algae (Jesed Francis Abiera Moreno)

Kilter, Matter and Ghosts: Remnant (Natasha Bourke) - 8.30pm

Kilter, Matter and Ghosts: Remnant is a new film work composed of performance documentation shot by Dervla Baker and moving image work created in collaboration with Maximilian Le Cain for Kilter Matter and Ghosts. Kilter Matter and Ghosts was a swimming pool-based one-woman performance vision that took place at the Gus Healy Swimming Pool as part of Cork Midsummer Festival 2024. It embraced a breadth of languages to reveal a story of wit and pathos about legacy, identity, transience, vulnerability and survival in an odd, chlorinated, urban womb. Swimming pools have long held Bourke’s interest by virtue of their uniquely secluded, mixed-demographic, self-organising, intimate, real and surreal qualities. Twelve years of reflective inquiry into physical and psychological states of suspension, institutional shaping, navigating a complex body and jumbled ancestral archive prompted this, her most ambitious work to-date. It brought audiences into a private world drawn from Bourke’s archive to ponder existential, scientific and esoteric themes with clownish, dark and dreamlike poeticism. For more information on Kilter, Matter and Ghosts and full credits, please visit: https://linkfly.to/60616BjU8Uu

Natasha Bourke is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish/Dutch descent with a fine art and extensive movement background. Her practice spans performance, film, photography, installation, archive, text, drawing and sound to contemplate themes in a surreal, playful and sincere way. She is an Outlaw and Sample Studios member, an Arts Council Next Generation Artist and has been recipient of several Arts Council, City council and other awards. Since 2009, Bourke has created a large body of live/filmic works, including boat-based T.U.G! Litter Womb on Lough Foyle, Derry for EchoEcho 2021 and her feature Concrete Keys which had a sell out premiere at Cork International Film festival 2022 with subsequent screenings at IFI, SIRIUS, Triskel Christchurch Cinema, Midleton Arts and Experimental Dance Music Film festivals. Pending funding, Bourke will develop a new 16mm moving image work in association with the Sirius Arts Centre examining Identity and erasure in post-colonial Ireland.

Sunday September 15th

CineSalon Masterclass: Rouzbeh Rashidi in Conversation

2pm UCC Department of Film and Screen Media

Kane Building B10.B, University College Cork, College Rd, Cork

Event free and unticketed

CineSalon, in partnership with UCC Film & Screen Media, is thrilled to present a masterclass with Rouzbeh Rashidi. Described as “the prototype of a (true) filmmaker of the future”, Rashidi is one of the most influential figures in Irish experimental cinema both as a filmmaker and, more recently, as an educator founding the highly successful EFS Film School in Berlin. He will engage in a wide-ranging, career-spanning masterclass moderated by his longtime colleague Maximilian Le Cain as part of a day of CineSalon talks and screenings at UCC.

Rouzbeh Rashidi is an Iranian-Irish filmmaker who has been making films since 2000, creating twelve experimental features and two hundred and one installments of his film series Homo Sapiens Project. Over this time, he developed a bold and exploratory approach to filmmaking, emphasising mood, atmosphere, visual rhythms, and the captivating interplay between sound and image. He doesn’t just experiment with cinema; he allows cinema to experiment on him, resulting in deeply immersive works that navigate a strange and unsettling territory, simultaneously uncannily familiar and utterly alien.

Sunday September 15th

Ghost Dust (Shells Le Cain) & Elpis (Rouzbeh Rashidi): Feature Film Double Bill

3.30pm UCC Department of Film and Screen Media

Kane Building B10.B, University College Cork, College Rd, Cork

Event free and unticketed

CineSalon presents a feature film double-bill as part of a day of events held in partnership with UCC Film & Screen Media. The directors of both films will be present for a post-screening Q&A.

CineSalon is delighted to host the world premiere of Ghost Dust, the first feature by Cork-based filmmaker Shells Le Cain. A transitory journey through twinkling lights radiating out of ethereal seasons and uncharted paths, Ghost Dust is a film of a ghost projected on to a ghost of a film. This visually enticing travelogue with a difference invites viewers along for a trip that dissolves memory, dream and reality into a lyrical, often psychedelic phantasmagoria. Ghost Dust is completed by an original soundtrack from veteran Cork sound artist Mick O’Shea.

Elpis is the latest feature by one of the true legends of contemporary experimental cinema: Rouzbeh Rashidi. It is a poetic essay film about the effects of the Iran–Iraq War and its trauma and psychological impact. It is narrated through the voice of a woman writing a book. It embraces many subjects, such as war, diaspora, immigration, love and alienation, using sensory and experiential techniques. The film showcases lavish, ethereal landscapes and nature. Iraqi-German writer and artist Claudia Basrawi narrates the film.

Shells Le Cain (Shelly Kamiel) is known for a series of acclaimed short films including Rinse: Repeat (2018), Blood in the Butter (2019), Supernova Cash Out (2020) and The Tommy Tomato Show (2021). These project an intense personal vision which is as unsettling as it is visually enticing. They unfold like shamanic trances marked by a kaleidoscopic beauty and imbued with a haunting current of melancholy. Rouzbeh Rashidi is an Iranian-Irish filmmaker who has been making films since 2000. From 2000 to 2019, he broke traditional boundaries in formalistic and thematic conventions. In 2023, his most recent feature Elpis marked a departure from his previous works as he dives into new realms of art and humanity that have always fascinated him. This phase of his filmmaking explores the power of slow cinema, poetic documentary techniques, and film essays.