Out of Focus emerged from the initiative of Kilkenny-based artists Juana Robles and Michael Higgins, aiming to showcase alternative cinema works often overlooked by conventional cinemas and mainstream avenues. This initiative strives to create a platform for artists, providing them with the opportunity to exhibit their work in a large, professional cinema setting.
The second series of screenings will take place on three Wednesdays this September at the Watergate Theatre in Kilkenny, each starting at 7:30 PM. During these screenings, Out of Focus will present a collection of works by Irish or Ireland-based artists producing experimental, innovative, and unconventional films and videos that blur the line between visual art and cinema.
Each screening will focus on a specific theme, showcasing both old and new productions, including short and feature films. Following each screening, there will be moderated discussions with the filmmakers in attendance, offering a unique insight into their creative processes.
Wed 10 Sep 2025
7.30pm
# 4 Hole in the Head
Duration - 95mins
There will be a post screening moderated Q&A by Michael Higgins with filmmaker Dean Kavanagh
John Kline Jnr. (John Curran) is an amateur filmmaker and cinema projectionist who was abandoned by his parents in unexplained circumstances as a child. Deeply affected by this trauma into adulthood, he hires actors to help him recreate his family’s home movies in an attempt to make sense of their disappearance. Kavanagh’s multi-layered, multi-formatted approach investigates questions of memory and the increasing role of technology in the mediation of experience in a manner evocative of Atom Egoyan and will no doubt reward repeat viewings.
Funded by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
DCP, 95 mins, 2022
Wed 17 Sep 2025
7.30pm
# 5 City Symphonies
A programme of short films exploring the life, memory and transformation of cities. This screening has been curated to sit alongside Butler Gallery’s exhibition Cities of the World, extending its exploration of how artists respond to the urban environment.
From Dublin to New York to Nouakchott and Mexico City, these films capture moments of change, resilience and imagination within the fabric of city life.
Duration: 76 mins
There will be a post screening moderated Q&A by Dean Kavanagh with the filmmakers.
Herbert Simms City by Paddy Cahill
Herbert Simms City, by Paddy Cahill, explores the work of Dublin Corporation’s Housing Architect, Herbert Simms, who, during a massive housing crisis, designed and oversaw the construction of 17,000 new homes in Dublin City from 1932 to 1948. The film observes some of Simms’ designs while featuring Nell Regan’s poem inspired by him and Irene Buckley’s original musical composition.
DCP, 2019, 3 mins
With Wind & White Cloud by Dónal Ó Céilleachair
With Wind & White Cloud by Dónal Ó Céilleachair pays homage to Oskar Fischinger’s 1927 film Walking from Munich to Berlin, which is one of the earliest films recorded in single-frame exposure. New York based filmmaker Ó Céilleachair repeats this process on his own travels between Istanbul’s Bosphorous shores and the heart of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, using the single-frame technique to create an intense, high-speed staccato viewing experience.
DCP, 2005, 4 mins
Missing Green by Anne Maree Barry
Missing Green by Anne Maree Barry follows a solitary woman as she walks through the eerie night-time landscape of Dublin’s Cork Street, a street once quiet and residential, now a bustling four-laned artery for city traffic, which narrators like Councillor John Gallagher, architect Gerry Cahill, journalist Frank McDonald, and sociologist Aileen O’Gorman remember as a much better place to live. Gone are the days when people could easily cross the road to visit neighbours or children could safely play on the street. Urban planners carved out this wide throughway to connect the city with its outlying suburbs.
DCP, 2013, 14 mins
Day 55 by Donal Foreman
Day 55 by Donal Foreman is the fourth in a series of six experimental documentaries exploring the sequence of political and collective experimen-tation that began in New York City on September 17th, 2011, under the banner of Occupy Wall Street. Using observational imagery and fragmen-ted montage to create a cinematic space that is more experiential than discursive, even as it evokes many of the tensions that defined the Occupy movement.
DCP, 2013, 8 mins
Nouakchott Rocks by Moira Tierney
Driving Through Dublin by Andrew Manson
Driving Through Dublin by Andrew Manson is an artist’s journey into town and back again in the early 80's.
DCP, 1982, 2 mins
Last Cycle from the friends and family of the late filmmaker Paddy Cahill
Dublin-based filmmaker Paddy Cahill died on April 9 2021.
A long time advocate of city cycling, Paddy asked his brother Conor to cycle his remains to the cemetery through Dublin city centre.
DCP, 2021, 6 mins
Nouakchott Rocks by Moira Tierney begins with dawn and ends with a sandstorm; it documents a day in the life of the Tevragh Zeina neighbourhood: football on the Saharan sand, locals busy about their affairs, a Berber tent taking shape and a factory producing hand-made concrete blocks for the steadily growing city.
DCP, 2012, 20 mins
Se Compra: Sin É by Jaki Irvine
Se Compra: Sin É by Jaki Irvine. The video opens in a small recording studio in Mexico City, with a pianist, cellist, violinist and singer tuning up and streets outside full of activity. Over the course of two years, the many hours of footage shot and recorded of street sellers, knife sharpeners, garbage collectors and others trying to make a precious living were condensed into a multilayered reflection on the strategies we use to hold onto ourselves, and the place of art and music in this process.
DCP, 2014, 19 mins
Wed 24 Sep 2025
7.30pm
# 6 Body Frames
Body Frames explores the intersection of performance, the body, and the moving image - where the body becomes both subject and medium, opening space for intimate, cultural, and political reflection through experimental film.
Duration: 106 mins
There will be a post screening moderated Q&A by Chloe Brenan with the filmmakers.
To mark the close of this year’s Watergate Theatre takeover, the screening will be followed by a live performative music and visual set by Hilary Woods at The Hole in the Wall. Admission to the performance is included with the cinema ticket.
Queering the Landscape by Francis Fay
Queering the Landscape sees the artist Francis Fay inhabit an alter ego. The ‘character’ is filmed reacting to the unique landscape of the Burren, Co Clare.
DCP, 2017, 3 mins
No More by Mairéad McClean
No More weaves archival performance footage with personal memory, linking physical discipline and inherited trauma. Set against the backdrop of 1970s Northern Ireland, the film blends image and sound to explore loss, resistance, and remembrance.
DCP, 2013, 16 mins
Report to an Academy by Sarah Browne
Report to an Academy draws from the Kafka story of the same title, exploring the contemporary academic environment as a neoliberal workplace. Where in Kafka's story, an ape delivers an address to a gathering on his transition into human life, this video features an octopus who speaks of her motivation to escape and transform herself from human material in search of new forms of articulacy and agility.
DCP, 2016, 30 mins
Falling in Grace/Rising Matter by Artem Trofimenko
Falling in Grace / Rising Matter is an experimental, poetic work in Super 8 that explores the threshold between memory and somatic imprint. Rooted in Sufi notions of ecstatic disintegration, the film engages with the fragility of analogue media as a metaphor for dislocated identity and the poetics of exile.
DCP, 2025, 7 mins
Play Ground by Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain
Play Ground is a tribute to the great Dutch filmmaker Frans Zwartjes. Langan & Le Cain play characters locked into patterns of sadomasochistic desire who seem unable to connect in this darkly playful but ultimately melancholy film. It formed the basis of the first Langan / Le Cain live performance.
DCP, 2017, 16 mins
Dawn by Frances Mezzetti
Featuring artists Michiko Kanzawa, Amanda Coogan, and Frances Mezzetti, Dawn is part of a series of improvised collaborative soundings created in response to, and in dialogue with, the natural environment.
As the sky slowly welcomes the sunrise at Dollymount Strand on the northside of Dublin Bay, the sea creeps in, creating her gentle, rhythmic lapping on the sandy beach. A red glow deepens, spreads, and heralds the start of a new day. Three figures are silhouetted as, through listening, they gradually respond in wordless vocals. They echo the occasional curious seagull. The camera is the only audience.
DCP, 1997/2025, 10 mins
Grind Mouth by Dominic Thorpe
Grind Mouth is a performance-to-camera filmed in the former workhouse in Callan, Kilkenny. The video comes from a body of work responding to the complex web of perpetration and complicity in relation to the Irish famine and related emigration. In the work a series of honed actions register an internal layering of embodied trauma, resulting from various levels of direct and indirect participation in oppression and atrocity.
DCP, 2016, 9 mins
Red Moon Rising by Vivienne Dick
Red Moon Rising is a celebration of the carnivalesque, through dance, performance and the spoken word. The film reaches towards a renewal of our embodiment with the Earth as a response to a belief in invincibility, and the desire of Man to dominate the planets. A red moon is both a beacon, and a warning.
DCP, 2015, 15 mins
Wed 4 Sep 2024
7.30pm
# 1 Youth Lens
'Youth Lens' showcases the innovative spirit of young people’s filmmaking that celebrates the transformative potential of filmmaking as a platform for self-expression, creativity, storytelling and community connection.
Films:
'Smiley Wiley' by 4th class students from Askeaton Senior National School and
'SMOLT' by Michael Higgins
Duration - 75mins
There will be a post screening moderated Q&A with filmmakers.
Book tickets
Smiley Wiley
Smolt by Michael Higgins
Smiley Wiley emerges from the creative collaboration of young talents at Askeaton National School, Co. Limerick under the guidance of Michael Higgins and Juana Robles in association with Askeaton Contemporary Arts. Created on 16mm film, this project allowed children to directly interact with the medium, scratching, painting, and drawing patterns onto its surface. The resulting film is a captivating exploration of mood and atmosphere, demonstrating the power of community engagement in shaping cinematic art.
16mm-2K DCP, 10mins, 2022
Twisting from cinema vérité to improvisation to pre-scripted lines SMOLT offers an intimate visceral slice-of-life of two kids in their concrete playground that is Dublin City. Conceived in the style of a bootleg VHS, the film captures the underground hustle where the boys encounter unexpected challenges involving counterfeit football jerseys, girls, guns, and drugs. Director Michael Higgins' experimental approach blurs the line between observer and participant, delivering an authentic portrayal of youthful urban exploration.
Multi-formats-2K DCP, 65mins, 2013
Wed 11 Sep 2024
7.30pm
# 2 I See a Darkness
Duration - 135mins
There will be a post screening moderated Q&A by Daniel Fitzpatrick (aemi) with filmmakers Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly.
I See a Darkness
by Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly
I See a Darkness is a film essay probing the complex historical relationship between photography, cinema and science. The film builds on Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly’s previous films which have screened internationally, drawing on material often overlooked or hidden: shadow archives, neglected cultural narratives in film, art and literature, disappeared or challenging areas of knowledge.
Shot in Paris, Death Valley, MIT and the Nevada nuclear test site, the film explores how new technologies of vision were from the outset aggressively instrumentalised by the military-industrial complex for its own ends. A mapping of the often contentious fusion of artistic and technological representational models of our world emerges, pivoting on three iconic figures whose lives and work intersected in compelling ways: Irish-born chrono-photographer Lucien Bull, Harold E. Edgerton (MIT Professor and Atomic test photographer), and oceanographer and conservationist Jacques Cousteau.
I See A Darkness ultimately questions what was disappeared in the ‘progressive’ narrative of image-capture technologies, especially considerations of the non-human and animal, and gestures towards what Jean-Christophe Bailly reminds us of when he writes: “the world in which we live is gazed upon by other beings, that the visible is shared among creatures, and that a politics should be invented on this basis, if it is not too late.
DCP, 135mins, 2023
Wed 25 Sep 2024
7.30pm
# 3 Drifting scapes
Utilising satellite imagery, Super 8, 16mm, digital and structural filmmaking, these experimental films explore the interconnectedness of nature, memory, environmental changes and human impact through innovative visual and storytelling techniques using water as the main element.
Films:
Man of Aral by Helena Gouveia Monteiro
Passage Migrants by Aoife Desmond
Mountain-Field, Field-Mountain by Anja Mahler
Estrangement by Sandra Johnston
Curraghinalt by Emily McFarland
FL. oz by Julie Murray
Duration - 112mins
There will be a post screening moderated Q&A with filmmakers.
Man of Aral by Helena Gouveia Monteiro
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Man of Aral by Helena Gouveia Monteiro presents an experimental narrative crafted from satellite imagery of the shrinking Sea of Aral in Central Asia, showcasing the profound geological and human changes to the region. This film combines digital time-lapse sequences with hand-manipulated 16mm film, accompanied by a soundtrack by Nicolas Clair.
16mm, 6mins, 2023
Mountain-Field, Field-Mountain by Anja Mahler
Mountain-Field, Field-Mountain by Anja Mahler experiments with structural filmmaking techniques, incorporating feedback systems and unique frame sequencing inspired by Marshall McLuhan's concept of nonlinear history.
DCP, 20mins, 2020
Curraghinalt by Emily McFarland
Curraghinalt by Emily McFarland is the first in a three-part video series exploring the changing ecology of the Sperrin Mountains in West Tyrone, North of Ireland. This single-channel video weaves documentary forms, dislocated sound, and testimonies from the Greencastle Peoples Office, a small rural community resisting Dalradian Gold Limited's mining plans. The film captures conversations from day 387 of the community's occupation, addressing themes of solidarity, political representation, and the legacies of historical colonialism.
DCP, 26mins, 2019
Passage Migrants by Aoife Desmond
In Passage Migrants by Aoife Desmond, the Poolbeg Peninsula in Dublin Bay becomes the canvas for a poetic exploration of transitory landscapes and personal narratives. Utilising Super 8 film and immersive sound design, the film captures the essence of movement and ephemeral nature within the physical environment.
Super 8mm-DCP, 30mins, 2020
Estrangement by Sandra Johnston
Estrangement explores the ambivalent emotions that are sensed in the gap between enchantment and alienation in moments of raw encountering within nature. It acts as a meditation on the hypnotic qualities of light, shadow and reflection as embodied experiences, also extending outwards as an experiment into the materiality of light as a filmic phenomenon that exists upon the limits of photographic technologies.
The process of making this film involved successive daily performative actions in the Borders region of Scotland improvising alternately and collaboratively with artist Alastair MacLennan, and with filmmaker Richard Ashrowan and family members Bridie and Lily Ashrowan. What emerged was a subtle experiential approach to working within a specific landscape, and the sense of becoming increasingly attuned to both the wild and domestic creatures living there.
DCP, 24mins, 2023
FL. oz by Julie Murray
FL. oz by Julie Murray explores Niagara Falls and an Atlantic City motel pool, juxtaposing these contrasting landscapes to evoke themes of scale and visual contrast.
16mm-DCP, 6mins, 2003
