Our last Rough Cut event of 2025 took place in person on Tuesday 2nd December at the ATRL, Trinity College Dublin with thanks to our partnership with Dr Sven Anderson and the School of Creative Arts. Although it was the final Rough Cut event of the year, it was our first with aemi’s 2025-2026 TIER 2 Artist Support Programme participants.
Rough Cut sessions offer film artists the opportunity to share and discuss works-in-progress in a supportive environment and they play a central role in aemi’s artist support programme.
We launched the second round of our artist development programme through an open call in the summer of 2025 and have been meeting with the participating artists on a monthly basis since then. The programme consists of information sessions, access to peer to peer support, artist-led workshops and the opportunity to present works in progress as part of these Rough Cut events. These events open up the artistic process for discussion and reflection, form connections around works in progress and make space for outside perspectives on a project before its shape and form is complete.
These events are not open to the public; instead the audience is made up of a small group of peers who are invited to actively participate in the conversations about the works in question. Because the works being presented and discussed are still in process, Rough Cut events are not recorded for public presentation.
Film artists Laura Fitzgerald, Erik Nuding and Richie Price all generously presented works in progress at Rough Cut and Aurélie Godet, Director of Programming at Cork International Film Festival lead the responses to our three artist film projects in process.
Laura Fitzgerald is a visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video, animation, text and audio. She is graduate of both the National College of Art & Design, Dublin and Royal College of Art, London. She received a Markievicz Award in 2024 and a Golden Fleece award in 2020. Recent exhibitions include: Labour of Love, The Glucksman Gallery; Staying with the trouble, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Car Wheels Going Around, with Lorna Corrigan at KCAT Art Centre.
The film Laura shared was the rough cut of a kind of experimental manual, combining animation and filmed footage about living in the countryside. The idea is to make a HOW TO, like how to deal with gates, cones, bins, cows, fields, neighbours, etc
Erik Nuding is a Sligo based non-fiction and hybrid filmmaker who creates ecologically minded work through long term cross-cultural collaborations, bringing together slow cinema and sensory ethnography as a means to explore multispecies relations. His first feature film currently in post-production, With Their Backs To The Sky, immerses into the entangled lives of bat catchers, scientists and old world fruit bats in the depleted forest of Madagascar. His last short film, An Ornithologist’s Daughter, was an intimate portrait of a woman chicken farmer reckoning with her father’s colonial ornithology practice during WWII. His films have screened at Visions Du Réel, Docs Ireland and Fid Marseille among others. Previous work has been funded by Sundance, Sandbox films and the Buffett Institute for Climate Crisis and Media. Erik received his MFA from Northwestern University (US) under J.P. Sniadecki, and a BA at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2025, he was selected as one of two Studio Bursary recipients at The Model In Sligo, and was awarded funding from both the Arts Council Ireland and Sligo County council.
Erik shared some material from his first feature in post production, With Their Backs To The Sky, which immerses into the entangled lives of bat catchers, scientists and old world fruit bats in the depleted forest of Madagascar. He will use this as a hinge point to discuss the very earliest ideas for a new film working with the same community, which centers around the recent proliferation of grave bone robbing and its threat to the ancestral ritual of exhumation: a practice sacred to Malagasy identity.
Richie Price is pursuing practice-based research that centres on the work of philosopher Henri Bergson. He works with sound and moving image in a variety of contexts. He has a particular interest in experimental film-making, generative art and creatively exploring visual and audio feedback techniques.
Richie’s project is an abstract exploration of how our perception is infused with memory. It is inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the theorists and artists he influenced. It will incorporate a blend of live action and a cinematic use of 3D pointcloud / gaussian splat models.
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Aurélie Godet is Director of Programming at Cork International Film Festival. Previously she was a senior programmer at the Berlinale for the past five editions, working with artistic director Carlo Chatrian on the selection of feature films and documentaries for the festival’s main sections. She is a member of the director’s advisory committee at Arte France Cinema and, in 2019, co-founded The Red Balloon Alliance, a collective of film professionals aiming for a better work-life balance and helping festivals in the organisation of daycare services for film professionals. From 2013 to 2019 she was a programmer at Locarno Film Festival, having joined the selection committee in 2013. In 2014 Aurélie contributed to launching the first international film festival in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She also worked as a programmer and moderator for French festivals 3 Continents and La Roche-sur-Yon. Prior to this, Aurélie worked as a consultant for production companies and wrote for several publications, including Cahiers du Cinéma. After a start in film production in 2004 assisting filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, she was Deputy Director of Unifrance’s New York office, enabling her to contribute to the promotion of French cinema in the US and to collaborate with North American distributors and film festivals.
