aemi’s new touring programme ‘Desire Lines’ premieres at the Irish Film Institute on Thursday 22nd January. Featuring films by Eóin Heaney, Basma al-Sharif, Chloe Brenan, Olivia Normile, and Collectif Faire Part, the screening will be followed by a Q&A with Chloe Brenan, Olivia Normile and Eóin Heaney.
‘Desire Lines’ is a term from the field of landscape architecture used, as Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology to ‘describe unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow.’ Taken as a whole, the films featured in ‘Desire Lines’ by Basma al-Sharif, Chloe Brenan, Olivia Normile, Collectif Faire Part and Eóin Heaney, offer up a picture of both imposed and chosen deviation, a picture that takes in experiences of isolation and displacement alongside those of collective resistance and revelation, taking care to capture the fleeting moments where these possibilities can briefly intersect.
‘Desire Lines’ is aemi’s 2026 touring programme, an annual selection of artist and experimental film that brings together a range of voices from contemporary Irish and international practice.
FILM INFORMATION
Verdigris, Chloe Brenan, 2025, Ireland 12 minutes
as above, so below (Limits and Demonstrations), Olivia Normile, 2025, Ireland, 3 minutes
Speech For A Melting Statue, Collectif Faire Part, 2023, Belgium, Congo, Democratic Republic, 10 minutes
Body Diagrams (Limits and Demonstrations), Olivia Normile, 2025, Ireland, 1 minute 30 seconds
Parish, Eóin Heaney, 2024, Ireland, 27 minutes
Total running time 75 minutes
FILMMAKER BIOS
Basma al-Sharif
Palestinian artist/filmmaker Basma al-Sharif explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works. Al-Sharif received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007, was a resident of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in 2009, the Pavillon Neuflize OBC at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014-15. She received a Jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009, was awarded a Visual Arts of the Fundación Botín in 2010, Mophradat’s Consortium Commissions in 2018, she was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme for 2022-2023 and was nominated for the Prix Aware for 2024. In 2025 al-Sharif published her first monograph titled “Semi-Nomadic-Debt-Ridden-
Chloe Brenan (she/her) is an artist from rural County Carlow working across moving image, language, publication, and sound. Her practice involves close, attentive examinations of the poetic haptics of daily life and processes at the edge of perception, calling into question the boundaries between bodies and environments, intimate spaces, and wider structures of power. Recent exhibitions and screenings include DINAMO: Exposure at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL); Against Stasis at DISSOLUTIONS Film Festival, The Complex, Dublin (IE); Take Hold at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry (NI); Flights From Reason, Cork International Film Festival, 69th Edition (IE); and Loose Definition (borders, proximity and domestic objects) at Whammy Analog Media, Los Angeles (US). She is a recipient of a Markievicz Award for Film, awarded as part of the Irish Decade of Centenaries.https://
Olivia Normile is an artist exploring language, communication, and perception through animation, installation, and experimental film. Through deconstructing film, drawing, and sculptural making, her work revolves around the notion of interruption and disruption in relation to speech and movement. Slow-making, repetition, and interludes feature prominently throughout, laying bare material elements, labour, and overlooked narratives. Recent awards include; Platform Commission, 41st EVA International (2025), South Dublin County Council Individual Artist Bursary (2025), Digital Media Practice Award, Firestation Artists’ Studios (2024), Arts Council Agility Award (2024, 2022, 2021). Recent exhibitions include; Dog-Eared Paradise, screen service, 2023, Matters of Table, Periphery Space, 2023, Remembering The Future, VISUAL Carlow, 2023, Deliverables, Pallas Projects/Studios, Artist Initiated Projects, 2022.
Collectif Faire-Part
COLLECTIF FAIRE-PART is an ensemble of Belgian & Congolese artists. They started out almost a decade ago with the intent to tell new stories about Kinshasa, about Brussels, and the many complex relations in between. Lately, their work has been turning more and more toward broader questions about power structures and collective resistance. Next to their shared practise, they try to support each other in their personal artistic projects. The group was founded by filmmakers Anne Reijniers, Paul Shemisi, Nizar Saleh en Rob Jacobs when they first started working together in 2016. Over recent years the collective of four has shape-shifted into a slightly larger group of regular collaborators, in which group composition changes with each project. Stephanie Collingwoode Williams and Amelia Malfait Lakhtara have been involved as co-curators and co-creators in various projects, stearing the group in new directions. Next to filmmaking the collective takes pictures, curates programs, gives workshops and hosts festivals. https://www.collectif-fairepart.com/
Eóin Heaney
Eóin Heaney is an award winning artist filmmaker living and working in Dublin, Ireland. He studied film production in Ballyfermot College of Further Education, Dublin and his previous work has been supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Screen Ireland, CCI Paris, France and Germany’s FFF Bayern and the Berlinale Film Festival. Eóin’s films use formal cinematic grammar, time and repetition to question our fragile relationships with identity, representation and lived reality. Eóin’s most recent work includes the multi-award winning experimental film SPIRIT LEVEL (an adaptation of Mycenae Lookout by poet Seamus Heaney), hybrid documentary PARISH, and M/S a film exploring illness and care that draws on his seventeen years experience as primary carer for his mother.
FILM SYNOPSES
Basma al-Sharif, Morning Circle / Morgenkreis, 2025, Canada/UAE, 21minutes
A short visceral narrative film unfolds in three parts to describe loss. From our earliest experience of separation to the imperceptible violence associated with integrating to a new country when yours is no longer livable, Morgenkreis follows a father and son in their intimate rituals as they prepare to start the day and head to kindergarten.
Chloe Brenan, Verdigris, 2025, Ireland 12 minutes
Verdigris is a digitised Super 8mm film shot largely during a residency in Paris. Drifting through the city, it explores how architecture shapes movement and how digression can serve as subtle resistance. Through textured, meandering visuals and the layering of specific histories, the film reflects on dailiness, standardisation, time, and control – suggesting that movement in the city is never truly neutral.
Olivia Normile, Limits and Demonstrations (from EVA Platform Commission), 2025, Ireland
The installation for which Olivia’s two videos were made consisted of video projection sequences, drawings, and sculptural interventions – each functioning like the parts of a deconstructed film. The work employed strategies of editing and collage to interrupt and disrupt the familiar patterns of speech and physical movement; laying bare the materiality and labour in the construction of representational narratives, whilst also fragmenting the passivity that tends to accompany our experience of film viewership and cinematic space.
Collectif Faire Part, Speech for a Melting Statue,2023, Belgium, Congo, Democratic Republic, 10 minutes
In June 2020, thousands of people took to the streets in Brussels to make a fist against police brutality and institutional racism in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. For a moment, it seemed that some demonstrators would take down the statue of colonial king Leopold II in a nearby square. For now the sculpture is still standing, but an optimistic poet already prepares her speech for the day it will be removed. Archival images of colonial monuments that arrive in a museum in Kinshasa, RDC are paired with a ceremonial text by poet Marie Paule Mugeni. The voice-over presents the official removal of a Brussel’s colonial statue as if scheduled for the very next day. However, in opposition to Kinshasa, there are no concrete plans for the statues’ takedown up to now.
Eóin Heaney, Parish, 2024, Ireland, 27 minutes
PARISH is a hybrid documentary that examines the representation of community identity. The film follows a communal choreography; a cinematic moveable feast where a diverse group of people add colour, nuance and shape to their community identity through the vivid, visceral nature of memory and its connection to dramatic experience. Shot on 16mm film in the Dublin suburb where I grew up and inspired by the ritual of Beating The Bounds, PARISH is a film work that utilizes documentary, fiction, biography, myth, and memoir.
