aemi announces mentorship programme with First Cut Youth Film Festival and filmmaker Lawrence Cook

Published date: 16 May 2024

Earlier this year aemi undertook a new collaboration with First Cut Youth Film Festival. The festival introduced for the first time this year the category of ‘Best Experimental Film’ and the winner of that prize filmmaker Lawrence Cook, a recent graduate of UCC’s MA in Film and Screen Media programme, will as part of that prize be placed in an ongoing mentorship programme with aemi in order to support his practice and development as a filmmaker.

Co-Director of aemi Daniel Fitzpatrick after seeing Lawrence’s film at the Festival said the following:

“I first encountered Lawrence Cook’s film ‘Did You Miss it?’ at First Cut Youth Film Festival (Lawrence was the recipient of the ‘best experimental film’ award and will take part in a mentorship programme with aemi) and I was immediately struck by how explicitly Joycean the film was. Its simultaneous siphoning of and opening up of all the possibilities contained within a single moment, this wrestling with the weight of possibility that a moment can hold, finds its most logical parallel not in existing cinematic forms but in the modernist literary experiments employed in those novels.”

Lawrence was one of a number of truly remarkable films aemi encountered at this year’s First Cut Youth Film Festival and aemi looks forward to continuing and extending its partnership with the festival.

Lawrence Cook Bio:

Lawrence Cook is an American artist and musician living in Cork. He began making short films through University College Cork’s master’s program in Film and Screen Media beginning in 2022, building on a background in theatre, music, and photography. Lawrence’s film work is centered around the reappropriation of archival materials and attempts in various ways to explore the gaps and tensions between urgent historical realities and the image-based representations that engage with them.