aemi & Gaze LGBTQIA+ International Film Festival Present: Ursa Minor
Light House Cinema, Smithfield, Dublin 7, SCREEN 3, Saturday 3rd August @ 13:10
There will be a post screening Q&A with filmmakers Juana Robles and Colm Higgins.
A constellation of films that move in and out of relationships with each other, ‘Ursa Minor’ is this year’s selection of artist and experimental film brought together by aemi for GAZE. Bound up with each other through shifting ideas of landscape, death and stardom, the works in this programme from Colm Higgins (Ireland), Jennifer Mehigan (Northern Ireland), P. Staff (U.K.), Kenneth Anger (U.S.A.) and Juana Robles (Spain-Ireland) invoke dream-like states where quotidian practices like getting dressed or making butter assume queer and otherworldly qualities. Collisions of private and public, material and immaterial proliferate throughout and the pain and suffering endured by the body is pierced by fleeting moments of pleasure, interspecies kinship and purposeful abandon.
FILM INFORMATION:
Kenneth Anger, Puce Moment, 1949, U.S.A., 6 minutes
Juana Robles, Alicia, 2024, Ireland, 25 minutes
Colm Higgins, The Legend of the Dun Cow, 2024, Ireland, 19 minutes
Jennifer Mehigan, Honeysuckle Joyride, 2022, Ireland, 13 minutes
P. Staff, Hevn, 2022, U.K., 5 minutes
Total running time: 68 minutes
Kenneth Anger, Puce Moment
Made over a decade before the original publication of his notorious Hollywood Babylon, underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger produced this short film, intending it to form part of a longer project. Starring Yvonne Marquis, the film follows her around her apartment as she gets dressed and ends just before she goes out to walk her four Borzoi dogs. Shot in colour in the late 1940s and featuring a psychedelic folk rock soundtrack from the 60s, this is an uncanny invocation of decadence and decline.
Juana Robles, Alicia
Originally shot on Super 8mm film and partially blown up to 16mm for the creation of collages made up of abstract and composed photograms, the film explores in a medium specific way the self-experimental search for artistic, gender and sexual identity of Zurich-based movement artist/teacher and former architect Toma Alice Péronnet (they, them, theirs).
Colm Higgins, The Legend of the Dun Cow
A camp and luscious exploration of butter and the sensorial experience of agricultural practice. Combining intense documentary footage with tableaus and original music, the film is a playful take on the place of the cow in the Irish consciousness.
Jennifer Mehigan, Honeysuckle Joyride
Honeysuckle Joyride is a commissioned video essay made in response to Bassam Al-Sabah’s show I AM ERROR which opened at Gawworks London in Summer 2021. The essay considers themes of decay, inter-species kinship and the Irish landscape through a post-humanist lens. Footage of various locations around the island are layered with computer-generated imagery, uncovering personal or domestic materialities of queerness, grief and horror as they intersect with the screen, and ideas of truth and reality in a space where public and private spheres are constantly colliding with and abstracting each other.
P. Staff, Hevn
Combining digital and analogue filmmaking techniques with poetry, hand painted animation and industrial sound, Hevn explores pleasure and pain in the sick or debilitated body with Staff’s ongoing interest in the volatility of queer and trans bodies. Glimpses of footage — a shower scene, traffic, friends gathering – are obscured and revealed by layers of hand painted film and lettering, eventually giving way to a titular poem that asks what happens to us in states of dreaming, volatility, inebriation and exhaustion.
