Our most recent Rough Cut event of 2026 took place in person on Tuesday February 17th at the Arts Technology Research Laboratory on Pearse Street with thanks to our partnership with Dr Sven Anderson and the School of Creative Arts at Trinity College Dublin.
All of our Rough Cut events are now tied into aemi’s Film Artist Development Programme, an initiative through which we provide a group of 9 film artists with regular support over a 12 month period at the centre of which is the opportunity to share works in progress as part of these Rough Cut events.
The idea with Rough Cut events is to open up the filmmaking process for discussion and reflection in a supportive setting, to form connections around works in progress and to fold in external perspectives on a project before its shape and form is finalised.
These events are not open to the public; instead the audience is made up of a small group of peers who are invited to participate in 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 Thomas Bennett, Dawn Richardson and Uma Magal all generously presented works in progress at our event on February 17th 2026 with artist and filmmaker Jenny Brady kindly leading responses to all three film projects.
Thomas Bennett
Nestled between fact and fiction, Thomas Bennett is a filmmaker and moving-image artist whose current output engages Hi8 Tape and Super 8 to push the capabilities of film as a medium. Living and working in Belfast, Thomas‘s work has shown at Raindance, Dublin International Film Festival and most recently Belfast Film Festival 2025 and Irish Film Festival London 2025 with his Hi8 work ‘Gabriel’s Trumpet’. Alongside producer and collaborator Niall McCloskey, they have launched production company Standing Stone Pictures as a vessel for their work. Whilst on the verge of releasing an NI Screen Funded short Film later in 2026, Thomas’s current moving-image art works look to explore outside of narrative fiction, engaging with the distorted landscape of movement and transport. Born from a desire to rework the formulaic, carefully calculated film-making process, Thomas’s recent work has centered on filming Hi8 sequences publicly in and around Belfast, Ireland. Through these Hi8 experiments, ‘movement’ has taken center stage. These short works focus on public transport, erratic situations and unconscious movement expressed through slowed down Hi8 montage and ‘fluxus’ style interactions between screen and audience.
Uma Magal
Uma Magal is the owner of Fenugreek Productions, a boutique studio for media and film work & training. She has a B.A. from Lady Shriram College, Delhi, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad and an M.A. in Communication from the Mass Communication Research Centre, J. M. I., Delhi. During her years in the U.S.A. she earned an M.F.A in film production from Temple University, produced a PBS weekly series, “News 6”, with 6th grade schoolchildren, taught film and media at San Francisco State and Temple Universities and served on the boards of Asian Arts Initiative and Independent Film and Video Association in Philadelphia. She worked with the Scribe Video Centre to teach media literacy and the use of video as an empowering tool, particularly for disenfranchised communities. Des-e-Dublin is a short film about a new citizen’s transformative experience of the Irish landscape and cultural imagination, featuring how Irish lore, poetry, literature, wit-humour etc. work in this regard. Combined with current social realities, immersed in the snarls, tussles, tugs and delights around reckonings with a new home country, the film aims to chew over how we find the ties that bind, abdicate the “either/or divides” and negotiate the emotional architecture of multiple bonds and fissures.
Dawn Richardson
Dawn Richardson (Belfast, Northern Ireland) is an artist working across experimental documentary and socially engaged practice, using often immersive, mostly withered technologies. Through Hosta Projects, they seek to decentralise authorship via co-creation, foregrounding decolonial approaches to storytelling and sound-making, as acts of cultural dissent. Their work interrogates technocratic power, psychogeography, and narrative legitimacy. They’re currently researching lunar cultural policy through the understanding of CoFuturisms and developing a new body of work in collaboration with a spitting priest in Ramallah. Upcoming Exhibition, Dungannon Tropicana, The MAC Belfast (May 2026). Supported by Future Screens NI, NI Screen, the Baring Foundation, and Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Member, Digital Arts Studios Belfast (DAS).
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Jenny Brady Bio:
Jenny Brady is an artist filmmaker based in Dublin, exploring ideas around speech, translation and communication. Her films have been presented at LUX, The New York Film Festival, Viennale, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Cork International Film Festival, Docs Ireland (with AEMI), This Long Century, MUBI, Essay Film Festival, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, TENT Rotterdam, EMAF, Videonale, Camden International Film Festival, Massachusetts, BFI London Film Festival, Images Festival, Toronto, November Film Festival, London the Irish Film Institute, Project Arts Centre, EVA International, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Whitechapel gallery and Tate Liverpool. Her works are distributed by LUX, an international arts agency that supports and promotes artists’ moving image practices and the ideas that surround them.
