We at aemi are excited to share the full programme of events we have planned for DISSOLUTIONS 2025.

Over three days aemi will screen work by just under forty remarkable filmmakers, showcasing both Irish and international, contemporary and historical works. DISSOLUTIONS ’25 also features several key collaborators, including guest curators Alice Quinn Banville, Clodagh Assata Boyce, Diaa Lagan and Oona Mosna of Media City Film Festival. 

We will officially open the festival with the Irish premiere of A Fidai Film, an intrepid work of experimental cinema from Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari that investigates the looting of Palestinian films which took place in Beirut in 1982. Using this event as a premise in order to make visible materials hidden in Israeli archives, A Fidai Film proposes a counter-narrative of a continuous history of appropriation. 

Our opening screening will be preceded by a panel discussion organised in collaboration with Paper Visual Art to mark the recent publication of ‘In the good seats’, their collection of essays on film as an art form and the idiosyncrasies of the cinema space. A key prompt for the discussion will be this New Yorker article from last year called ‘The Battle For Attention’ and a central focus will be what it means to engage with artist and experimental film as part of a festival and what distinguishes the audience experience from solitary viewing.

The opening night of the festival will conclude with ‘Against Stasis’, a two part screening of works from aemi’s first group of Tier 2 artists, Michael Barwise, Chloe Brenan, Rik Higashikawa, Colm Higgins, Jack Hogan, Ann Upton, Luke van Gelderen and Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz.

Our international artist in focus for the festival is the Palestinian filmmaker Basma al-Sharif. Basma will present a solo screening of her work curated by Dublin-based artist Diaa Lagan on Saturday September 27th at 18.30. She will also lead a FREE practice-based workshop on humour as a political tool in artist filmmaking in ‘Together We Can Stop This Shit‘ on Sunday September 28th at 12pm. 

Saturday will also feature a programme of fanvid DIY film club works called ‘Making Do’ curated by Alice Quinn Banville and a late night 16mm screening of six works by Peter Tscherkassky, Mary Helena Clark and Paul Sharits in ‘Peter, Paul and Mary’. 

We also have an international festival focus this year with ‘Our Tongues in Exile’, a programme curated by Oona Mosna, Artistic Director of Media City Film Festival, reflecting on key works from the festival’s history by artists including Mati Diop, Rosalind Nashashibi and Ja’Tovia Gary. We will be joined by Jeremy Rigsby, a programmer at the festival who will be giving a talk for filmmakers on Saturday September 28th about the changing shape of international festivals and how this affects film artists.  

The third and last day of the festival will feature a rare screening of Shari Frilot’s Black Nations/Queer Nations? (1995) curated by Clodagh Assata Boyce who will lead a discussion after the film with Dr John Wilkins on the 1995 conference on lesbian and gay sexualities in the African diaspora at the heart of Frilot’s film. 

Sunday also features a programme of Irish premieres on ideas of pattern and mirroring by Sarah Ballard, Callum Hill and Maeve Brennan. Our closing event is a very special screening of Thaddeus O’Sullivan‘s impressionistic survey of the Irish emigrant experience On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978), featuring contributions from the likes of Stephen Rea, Gabriel Byrne, Mannix Flynn, and Christy Moore. We are delighted to be joined by director Thaddeus O’Sullivan for a discussion about the film led by Ruairí McCann following the screening. 

We really hope you can join us and look forward to seeing you there.

aemi