IFI & aemi present: AT THE HEART OF THE REAL
APRIL 7th 18.30
At the centre of the four films in this aemi-curated programme is an interest in how bodies connect to and through their environment, how nature seeps into us and in turn is made and corrupted by us. Made collaboratively in four disparate contexts – Dublin, Wicklow, Jamaica and Winnipeg – each film circles around ideas of community; ideas of home, ritual, friendship, myth and memory. Shot on analogue and digital formats, these DIY, independent films offer ways of remaking the world amongst and against pervasive systems of control.
aemi is delighted to welcome filmmakers Eóin Heaney and Rik Higashikawa to take part in a Q&A after the screening.
FILM INFO:
PARISH, Dir. Eóin Heaney, 2023, Ireland, 25 minutes
PARISH is an 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.
Without a heart fragments, Dir. Rik Higashikawa, 2024 Ireland, 8 minutes
This film piece is concerned with describing the conflicting sociopolitical desires of The Avoca Mines, a post-industrial mining site. Questions of ‘home’ and an examination of how one might orient themselves to a now barren land reverberate throughout. The work fuses archival imagery, postcards, text, interview material and Riks own filmed footage to create a visual document that attempts to underline the sedimented layers of industrial and commercial influence as well the interpersonal nuances that has come to shape the place, both metaphysically and physically.
a river holds a perfect memory, Dir. Hope Pearl Strickland, 2024, U.K., 17 minutes
a river holds a perfect memory (2024), traces diasporic memory and family migration between the UK and Jamaica. The film meanders gently across waterways in Jamaica, through leisure activities such as rafting on the Martha Brae River and a night-time boat trip in Falmouth’s bioluminescent Lagoon. In the UK, archival footage tracks industrial impact upon the landscape in Northern England – as water becomes a resource and a reservoir is constructed in Rochdale.
Fort Garry Lions Pool, Dir Ryan Steel, 2024, Canada, 6 minutes
Before I knew. When I could only sense.
Total running time: 56 minutes
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.
Rik Higashikawa is a multidisciplinary artist who works across experimental moving image, performance, art writing and site-specific collaborative interventions. Works are often presented as secretive, accidental or unauthorised events and are accented by their quiet or meditative undertones. Correspondingly, their films are composed of found, salvaged or ready-to-hand linguistic and visual ephemera: poor images,
hasty screenshots, ripped visual copies, forgotten words, stock phrases and fragments of personal testimonies run throughout. Deeply invested in paying attention to the unpremeditated within their practice, Rik attempts to brush up against what subjectivities, systems and imaginaries may yet be possible.
Hope Pearl Strickland is a British Jamaican artist-filmmaker and researcher from Manchester, UK. Her work sits at the intersection of experimental film and documentary practices, moving across archival, analogue and digital formats in order to quietly sit across from and outside of time. Her practice wrestles with violence, disparate colonial landscapes and attempts to ask how we might live in a world and relate to one another with care whilst amongst and against systems of power and control.
Ryan Steel is interdisciplinary filmmaker from Winnipeg, Manitoba. His work is informed by his DIY ethics, obsession with hazy analog images, and longtime membership to the Winnipeg Film Group.
aemi is an Arts Council-funded organisation dedicated to the support and development of artist film in Ireland. For more details visit www.aemi.ie
