Content Warnings
Three concentrated doses of cinematic pleasure. Artists in this programme meditate on storytelling and agency, synthesising practices of filmmaking and living to suggest new forms of intergenerational care. The ways we interpret our collective selves are explored through tender engagements with technologies of record and remembrance.
Followed by a Q&A with Cat and Éiméar McClay, Eitan Efrat and Sirah Brutmann, and Jenny Brady
A mother’s love for her baby
Using a combination of 3D animation and experimental prose, A mother’s love for her baby explores the corruption and conditions endemic in the Magdalene Laundries and mother and baby homes run by the Catholic church in Ireland throughout the 20th century. Influenced by Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” – the use of storytelling to fill the gaps left in historical records – the film advocates for a bottom-up form of historiography: centring historically marginalised voices of Irish women and critiquing the structures of power that (re)produce their dispossession.
Is it a knife because…
A film made at home; an uncompromising look at ways in which parenthood and the process of filmmaking crush into each other. Through a collection of family videos, the film challenges the dynamics of agency that children and grown-ups have over their images. Different forms of entangled love and violence are rendered visible and audible within the household setting in an honest attempt to understand where light comes from — and all the while, the police are outside the window.
Music for Solo Performer
Part-homage, part-sequel, Music for Solo Performer is a filmic reimagining of composer Alvin Lucier’s work for amplified brainwaves, drawing connections between the 1969 composition, speech synthesis and the passing of the filmmaker’s mother. Brady’s disparate assemblage of found sound and image – including EEG analysis, a Jerry Lewis Telethon and the first pizza ordered via synthesized voice – combines to form a densely concentrated transmission of cinematic pleasure, meditating on the relationship between illness and technology with pathos and care.