Saturday 20 July 2013

EFS @ Open Night Cinema in August 2015


Experimental Film Society in association with Open Night Cinema will present three programmes of underground film/expanded cinema each Saturday for the first three weeks of August 2015. The programmes will be presented in a large, atmospheric, industrial space situated in Inchicore, Dublin 8. EFS members Rouzbeh RashidiDean KavanaghMaximilian Le Cain and Michael Higgins will specifically design, present and document each event, engaging fully with the site and the audience. The results of this documentation will emerge as part of their mammoth upcoming feature film Homo Sapiens Project 200. The goal is to employ this vortex-like space as a projection and shooting location that functions as a living organism containing the memories of a future cinema. Each of these programmes will highlight the unique aspect of the abilities that each individual filmmaker possesses and, in creating this black hole of cinema, they will exorcise the elements and atmospheres, colliding them into what will become Homo Sapiens Project 200.


Saturday 1st August 2015 10PM:


Murder (2014)
By Michael Higgins / Ireland / 5mins


Funnel Web Family (2013)
By Michael Higgins / Ireland / 14mins 

Friends with Johnny Kline (2015) 
By Dean Kavanagh / Ireland / 17:30mins 

Homo Sapiens Project (97) (2012)
By Rouzbeh Rashidi / Ireland / 20mins

Night Regulation (2014)
By Maximilian Le cain /  USA-Ireland / 25mins




Saturday 8th August 2015 10PM:


Homo Sapiens Project (174, 181-199) (2014-2015)
By Rouzbeh Rashidi, Dean Kavanagh & Maximilian Le cain / Ireland / 111mins



Saturday 15th August 2015 10PM:


Michael Higgins In Focus: The Illuminated Room - An expanded cinema event.

Doors - 9PM
Show starts - 10PM
FREE ENTRY - All Welcome
12 Midnight is the last LUAS on Saturday Nights



Address: Goldenbridge Industrial Estate, Tyrconnell Rd, Inchicore, Dublin 8


Map HERE



Saturday 5 January 2013

Archive




"A Harbour Town" (2013) and short film "Maritime" (2012)
mnetioned along with
in Senses of Cinema's world poll 2013.

Featured in lists by Jit Phokaew and Maximilian Le Cain











Late Hours of the Night complete series online


The internet mini-series "Late Hours of the Night" created by Dean Kavanagh, 
produced by "Experimental Film Society" and "Easter Film Group"
was released online via EFS Film Archive. 

You can watch all the episodes here:

E01
E02
E03
E04
E05



More info:
www.deankavanagh.com/







This is the final episode of the series.





This online mini-series was produced by Experimental Film Society & Easter Film Group.













The first episode of "Late Hours of the Night" is now online.

The 4 remaining episodes will be released each week (11th, 18th, 25th, 1st).
The final episode is a Christmas Special.


Cinephile, Critic and Filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain 
has written a small piece about it on his blog. 
















poster by Rouzbeh Rashidi








 Location Photographs from 
"A Harbour Town" (2013)


Shane Vernon (above pictured) on location

(above pictured from left) Dean Kavanagh, Shane Vernon, John Curran

Rouzbeh Rashidi (above pictured on location in Dublin, simultaneously shooting scenes for his film 


(above) Rouzbeh Rashidi on location, Dublin.

Cast/Crew wrap (above from left: John Curran, Shane Vernon, Leon Kavanagh, Dean Kavanagh)
Armourer: Michael Roe

A salvaged/customised kit used on the production.






NEW IRISH UNDERGROUND FILM

Spectacle Theater, New York


NOVEMBER 7th
NOVEMBER 21st
DECEMBER 5th



NEW IRISH UNDERGROUND FILM

Irish cinema has never been renowned for harboring a vibrant underground or experimental film scene. There have been significant exceptions (most importantly, aspects of the Irish “First Wave” of the 1970s), but it’s only in recent years that a body of films has emerged that offer a powerful rebuttal to that perception. While to announce a fully-fledged “movement” would be premature, it is safe to say that the work of the four filmmakers featured in this series – Rouzbeh Rashidi, Maximilian Le Cain, Dean Kavanagh and Michael Higgins – represent an important new direction in Irish cinema. Working with minimal and usually non-existent budgets, primarily on video, with zero crew and casts typically drawn from friends and family, all four filmmakers have been developing at a prolific rate over the past few years. Between them, they have produced 32 features since 2008 – though it must be admitted Rashidi, who in 2012 alone directed 9 features and 76 short films, has been the most insanely fertile contributor. All the filmmakers are members of the Experimental Film Society, an international organization founded by Rashidi aiming “to produce and promote films by its members” who are “distinguished by an uncompromising, no-budget devotion to personal, experimental cinema.” As this series will make clear, they have also been known to appear in each other’s films, and even collaborate on film projects together from time to time. (Strangely enough, Rashidi, Le Cain and Kavanagh have even released three albums of sound art together, under the collective moniker “Cinema Cyanide”.)

For the most part, the films operate in an uncanny space between experimental and narrative film. On the one hand, generally eschewing plot and any conventional notion of “eventfulness” in favor of the immediate sensuousness of images and sounds and their juxtaposition – on the other hand, using performers, locations, lighting and sound design to evoke affects and atmospheres more readily associated with genre cinema, especially the horror film. Le Cain, also an accomplished critic, once wrote about David Lynch that he “frees the paranoia of noir from the straightjacket of narrative … [drowning] the plot in a great tidal wave of emotion”, and one can identify a similar impulse at work across many of these films. Le Cain adds that “the most unsettling aspect of [Lynch’s work] is that the fear seems to come from a source that is deeper than the plot indicates.” It’s this deeper level that these filmmakers mostly concern themselves with. As the title of our opening film, There is No Escape from the Terrors of the Mind (2013), makes explicit, the unease evoked is existential rather than circumstantial: it’s much more about the nature of perception, memory and consciousness than anything that can be resolved, or even expressed, through action or dialogue. Usually forsaking plot entirely to tackle these depths head-on, the films mostly seem to reside in a strange, subterranean world free of the typical “narrative” trappings of our daily life. Jobs, money, the State, even social interaction, are rarely visible. Instead, there are bodies and there are spaces, there are sensations and there are memories, and there is the coming-into-being and intermingling of each of these through processes of perception (and cinema). 

When language is foregrounded in these worlds – for example, in Higgins’ Birds on a Wire (2011) or Rashidi’s Bipedality (2010) – it is usually fragile and woefully insufficient. Le Cain has described Bipedality one of Rashidi’s last films to feature extensive dialogues, as a study of “how inadequate language is to communicate feeling, or to grapple with the mysteries of existing in any given moment in relation to another person or simply to the world that surrounds one”, a world that is, in contrast, “almost overwhelmingly vivid and sensuous.” It’s our primal and problematic relationship to the world in this sense, that each of these filmmakers focus on in different ways: not the world before the Word (in the sense of Brakhage’s “untutored eye”) so much as a world beneath the Word, a subterranean field of sensations that is always available to us but which we can rarely share or articulate in social or verbal terms. 

Although it’s worth thinking through the question of whether this aesthetic direction is ultimately limited by its rejection of social or political contingencies and distrust of verbal expression, Le Cain’s thoughts on Rashidi make an opposing case that could apply to all four filmmakers: “He is not interested in cinema as a record or replication of communication, but in what cinema can itself best communicate through sound and image. … He is concerned with the intensely private experiences of perception that perhaps cinema alone has the tools to communicate adequately.” Or put another way, we could pick up the idea of filmmakers Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni from their recent film In Search of Uiq (2013) that, “In our universe, we are tuned to the frequency that corresponds to the reality of capitalism … An infinite number of parallel realities coexist with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them.” At their best, Rashidi, Le Cain, Kavanagh and Higgins have found ways to tune into some of those other frequencies, and now invite us to join them.

Programmed by Donal Foreman, with special thanks to the Experimental Film Society.

For more information please visit Spectacle Theater: HERE & HERE

See the TRAILER of the whole programme HERE


Thursday, November 7

7.30pm HSP: THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM THE TERRORS OF THE MIND (Rouzbeh Rashidi, 120mins, 2013)

TRAILER: HERE

“HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind consists of three medium length instalments of an ongoing film project by Rashidi, Homo Sapiens Project. These instalments, when watched back-to-back, will function as a single film structured in episodes. A mysterious loner, perhaps a poet, journeys through a series of uncanny surrealistic landscapes with an unclear purpose. His adventure is divided into three sections. The main theme of this experiment is to compare the eerier qualities of different landscapes and interpose the characters within them, elaborating the project’s ongoing preoccupation with extracting sinister moods from ordinary settings. In a way, these can be seen as experimental horror films in which an atmosphere of dread is evoked and sustained without the expected narrative trappings.” –Rouzbeh Rashidi


10pm BIPEDALITY (Rouzbeh Rashidi, 68mins, 2010)

TRAILER: HERE

“It is rare and thrilling to encounter a film that seems to pre-exist the viewer's presence, one which pitches the audience into a disturbingly private universe and trusts it to find its bearings within an alien environment that belongs more to the characters than the spectator. There is no better example of this than Rouzbeh Rashidi's magnificent and profoundly mysterious new underground feature Bipedality (2010). A two-hander focusing exclusively on a young couple played by Dean Kavanagh and Julia Gelezova, it troublingly articulates the way in which two people, even while sharing an intimate relationship, can remain mysterious to each other- and perhaps also to themselves.” – Maximilian Le Cain

www.rouzbehrashidi.com


Thursday, November 21

7.30pm A HARBOUR TOWN (Dean Kavanagh, 92mins, 2013)

TRAILER: HERE

“A young girl lives with her brother in a small cottage in the countryside. In the city a Health Inspector explores an abandoned building. It is unclear what has happened but it is evident that there have been environmental changes. A terrible sense of dread ensues and separates the brother and sister. The brother continues with his mundane chores in isolation, while the young girl drifts further away into the depths of a large rotting forest where she eventually disappears.” –Dean Kavanagh

“Based in a small town in Co. Wicklow, working alone, without budgets and with casts more often than not drawn from his family, Kavanagh is a melancholy visionary of brooding isolation. His obscure narratives tend to focus either on the private rituals of home life or mysterious journeys to or from ‘home', to or from memory…. His is unquestionably a cinema of contemplation: places, objects, faces, atmospheres and their immediate emotional charge are his stock in trade. Rather than telling stories in any traditional sense, his best films generate a slow, throbbing ache that invades and haunts his viewers. His world is rainswept, claustrophobic, fixated on details, with even his urban images steeped in rural gloom.” – Maximilian Le cain

www.deankavanagh.com


10pm SHORT FILMS: MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN & VICKY LANGAN (60mins)

Since 2010, sound/performance artist Vicky Langan (aka Wölflinge) and experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain have been working together in a unique creative audio-visual partnership. This is built on the strikingly fitting match between Langan’s magnetic, often troublingly intense presence as a performer and Le Cain’s distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms. So far, they have completed eight moving image works together, six of which are presented in this program:

CONTACT (2011, 3 mins) uses Super-8 elements in constructing a dialectical relationship between film image and material.

WOLFLINGE 17/11/'10 (2011, 8 mins) is a haunting visual interpretation of a performance by Langan that breaks down the boundaries between spectator and performer.

LIGHT/SOUND (2010, 9 mins) their first video, acclaimed by critic Fergus Daly as one of the top ten films of 2010 in the Senses of Cinema magazine end of year poll, was chosen for distribution by Paris-based experimental film cooperative Collectif Jeune Cinéma.

HEREUNDER (2011, 12 mins) is an intense, fragmented (auto)biographical portrait of Vicky, which sets her adrift amidst lockers of garden shed bric-a-brac from which she summons an ocean of sound.

DESK 13 (2011, 8 mins) brings a darker, more erotic aspect of their vision to the fore.

DIRT (2012, 12 mins) is a phantasmagoric mélange of live performances and elements of gothic horror, resulting in a haunting, intense and sometimes humorous portrait of Wölflinge.




Thursday, December 5

7.30pm HISTORY OF WATER (Dean Kavanagh, 62mins, 2012) + BIRDS ON A WIRE (Michael Higgins, 63mins, 2011)

TRAILERS: HERE and HERE

This double bill of hour-long pieces by Dean Kavanagh and Michael Higgins are perhaps the most identifiably Irish films in the season, focused as they are on the texture of rural landscapes and atmospheres. 

Kavanagh’s first long-form work, History of Water, draws tremendous visual power out of a limited series of characters and spaces around his family home and native town of Greystones, Co. Wicklow. The minimal and even hermetic scope of the film is countered by consistently rich and sensuous imagery in which local weather plays an evocative part. The underlying unease which is developed and at times becomes overwhelming, is hinted at in Kavanagh’s own synopsis of the film, which seems to function both as a description of the film’s narrative and its production: “A young man films his family to better understand them. As a result he becomes destroyed by them.”

On the other hand, Michael Higgins’ Birds on a Wire, the third film in his “road movie trilogy”, takes a paradoxically austere and static approach to a touristic journey along Ireland’s west coast. Two Polish women “experience both Ireland’s mythical history and contemporary weather patterns”, through a series of mostly distanced black and white tableaus, emphasizing the interplay of bodies, earth, weather and the flow of time much more than any contextual specifics of geography or personality.




10pm WEIRD WEIRD MOVIE KIDS DO NOT WATCH THE MOVIE (Maximilian Le Cain / Rouzbeh Rashidi, 80mins, 2013)

TRAILER: HERE

Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie is the second collaborative feature film between Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain. This hypnotic, visually and sonically immersive exploration of a haunted space unfolds in two parts. In the first, a woman (Eadaoin O’Donoghue) dissolves her identity into the ghostly resonances she finds in the rooms and corridors of a sprawling, atmospheric seaside basement property. In the second, a man (Rashidi), existing in a parallel dimension of the same space, pursues a bizarre and perverse amorous obsession.



New Film
"Revenants on Trial"
Available for online viewing














A Video Loop for Cork Film Centre Gallery

SeeSound Event, October 20th 2013









"I think HISTORY OF WATER (2012, Dean Kavanagh) and A HARBOUR TOWN are among very few films in this world in which humidity seems to exist as a character
 When I watch Kavanagh’s films, I can feel dampness in the air, especially when I hear the sound of water, or see the cloudy sky, or see some waterdrops hanging from branches of a tree, or see the mist in the town, or see the vapor slowly disappearing from a windowpane, or see vapor covering the camera lens."










Love Songs is the 4th release by Cinema Cyanide-
a sound project by filmmakers
Rouzbeh Rashidi, Maximilian Le Cain and Dean Kavanagh.








RIP Neil O'Callaghan






MARITIME



Short film completed in 2012.

Cast: Neil O'Callaghan
Thanks to Christian & Peggie Steele

12mins | Colour | Silent | Dslr | 16:9 | Ireland








Late Hours of the Night



Late Hours of the Night is a film series in which a character has experienced a terrible ordeal.
Furthermore, the character has been removed entirely thus the audience is left solely with the memories and disturbances. 

Though the project is episodical, the parts could appear also like individual scenes. 
An aim  would be to incorporate an atmosphere closer to that of an old late night radio serial than a typical online miniseries.

The project consists of 5 films, each varying in length.
The final episode will be a 'Christmas Special'. 

Once all the segments are complete they will exist  as a series and will also be incorporated into a feature film.



Stay Tuned
Easter | Film Group





Promotional Card for
"Sound From The Valley Floor"





Official Poster for "A HARBOUR TOWN"



Poster & Concept by Dean Kavanagh




Late Hours of the Night
More information soon



A Harbour Town
A promotional drawing by Paul Dowling, based on a character from "A Harbour Town".

Paul's blog




Review of "A HARBOUR TOWN"
by Maximilian Le Cain

"In an article I wrote last year about Dean Kavanagh's films, I called him 'Irish cinema's best kept secret'. His brand new feature film, A Harbour Town,  adds overwhelming urgency to the need to get that 'secret' out there. In this extraordinary, utterly idiosyncratic new masterpiece, Dean has surpassed even the finest of his short films. An uncomfortable, elusive work that gets right under the skin, A Harbour Town blurs the boundaries between banal details of daily life and the weirdness of our unconscious, often tactile perception of them. An unsettling experience to be sure, one that it's very hard not to carry back into 'real life' (a condition this film constantly interrogates) after viewing. This new movie consolidates Dean's status as undoubtedly the most unique and mysterious filmmaker in Ireland. And, to my mind, one of the most fascinating anywhere."

Visit the Blog & Website here:





A HARBOUR TOWN
Has been completed




 'A journey into the dark visions of a small coastal town.
Memories of the inhabitants or memories created by the place itself.'

Cast:

Leon Kavanagh, John Curran, Natalie Kavanagh,
Rouzbeh Rashidi, Dean Kavanagh, Shane Vernon, Vanessa Kavanagh
Matthew Moynihan, Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Maximilian Le Cain

Co-production between Experimental Film Society & Easter | Film Group

Trailer


92mins | Colour | Dslr HD | 1.77:1 | Stereo | 2013


More news soon




A Harbour Town - Official Trailer


Co-production between Easter Film Group Experimental Film Society

Coming Soon - 2013




A Harbour Town
Has entered Post-Production


TBC 2013










'A Harbour Town'
TBC 2013



Fundit Campaign Successful

A sincere thank you to all of the funders who donated and supported my project ‘A Harbour Town’
which has now been successfully funded at €2095.

Thanks to:
Everyone who supported & shared the campaign page on their FB/Twitter/website

And to the funders:
Mike Nedved, Maximilian Le Cain, Andrew Ennis, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Alan Lambert, Jason Marsh, Donal Foreman, Maciek Klich, Maximilian Ramsbottom, Michael Higgins, Martin Gallagher, Eleen Murphy , My Sjögren Blücher , Farzad Fahim, Seamus Hegarty, Orla McNelis, Darragh Sinnott, Christopher O’Neill , Ricardo Deakin,  Leo Kennedy, Vicky Langan, Rita Skersyte, Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Suri Grennel, Alice Kavanagh, Patrick Donnelly, Jit Phokaew, John Corcoran, Mick O’Shea, Katell Paillard, Matthew Moynihan, Kevin Fisher, John Curran, Shane Vernon, Johnny Allen
And the 3 funders who are anonymous.
A special thanks to Colin & the Harbour Bar Bray, Patrick James Grabolle & the audience @ KinoTeka

The film will be made in association with Experimental Film Society.











A HARBOUR TOWN - Cast Update -


Filmmaker & Cinephile Rouzbeh Rashidi (website) will also feature in 'A Harbour Town'.
Dean Kavanagh has featured in several of Rashidi's short films and feature films (Only Human, 2009 | Bipedality, 2010).
While Rashidi has also appeared in the short films 'F' (2008) and '3Over4' (2008) by Kavanagh.


(above image from '3Over4', 2008)




A HARBOUR TOWN - Cast Update - 'Small Role'

Shane Vernon (who starred in my short films 'Trilogy of Houses' (2008), 'Poor Edward' (2009), 'Light From An Old Town' (2011),
Scene 3 from 'The Last of Deductive Frames' (2012) will have a role in the film 'A Harbour Town'.




Show Support for the project HERE



A HARBOUR TOWN - Cast Update - 'Small Role'

John Curran ('Light From An Old Town', 2011) is now on-board to play the small role of 'Accordion John', the strange seaside accordion player who only plays at night.

(above, John in 'Light From An Old Town')








Support This Project HERE


Support!

Unique and Renowned Irish Filmmaker & Critic Donal Foreman has tweeted his support
https://twitter.com/donalforeman/status/291916008682307585

"Dean Kavanagh is the future of Irish Cinema...Help him make his second feature"


Also the Irish Film Institute (IFI) have shown their support:
https://twitter.com/IFI_Dub/status/293727699950780416

"Avant-garde filmmaker Dean Kavanagh's feature A Harbour Town needs your support on @FundIt - donate & make it happen!"


FUND IT HERE




Call for Funding
Link below to Film Ireland article
HERE





New Project Update

Leon Kavanagh has performed in many of Dean Kavanagh's films since 2008,
 he will have a prominent role in 'A Harbour Town'.



Leon Kavanagh on location in Co. Wicklow.






Update posted on Tuesday 15th January '13 @ 04:01:13
Many thanks to those who have helped fund the project so far!

Any gesture big or small can help- even sharing the FUND-IT project page would help circulate it to potential funders.


Watch this space for more updates over the coming days.


Link HERE

Other links with information:
www.easterfilmgroup.blogspot.ie