CineSalon Experimental Film Festival 2025
In-Person Programme
CineSalon - Worse Things Happen at Sea
Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh; Friday December 5th 7-10pm
CineSalon launches its 2025 edition at the ocean’s edge in the beautiful and historic Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, with an evening of film and performance.
Prelude to Amusements (Shells Kamiel Le Cain & Mick O’Shea) (live performance)
Amusements (Shells Kamiel Le Cain)
Morphosis (Lichun Tseng & Mick O’Shea)
Where the Forest Dreams (Darja-Kazimira Zimina)
Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch the Movie (Rouzbeh Rashidi & Maximilian Le Cain)
The centrepiece of the programme is an unsung part of the venue’s history: Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch the Movie, a haunting experimental feature by Rouzbeh Rashidi & Maximilian Le Cain made in response to the ghostly atmosphere of the building and shot entirely within its walls. Although completed in 2013, this is the first ever screening in Sirius Arts Centre, bringing the work and its location and inspiration together in a unique experience.
Amusements is the premiere of the latest work by Shells Kamiel Le Cain, whose films unfold like shamanic trances conjuring visions that dissolve memory, dream and reality into a lyrical, often psychedelic phantasmagoria. An alien race from our future's past on a mission to explore dark energy sent a technologically advanced camera into what they thought was a typical black hole to record pictures and sound for their 'Black Hole Archives'. The screening is preceded by Prelude to Amusements, a live performance by Kamiel Le Cain in collaboration with artist Mick O’Shea.
Morphosis is a hypnotically haptic collaboration between filmmaker Lichun Tseng and artist Mick O’Shea, in which the repetition of a single intimate gesture results in a journey in flux, where sound and image move sometimes in parallel, sometimes in cohesion, independent yet interlaced, in a shift between memory and reality, past and present.
Where the Forest Dreams is the latest film by one of CineSalon’s true heroes: ritual improviser, musician and artist Darja-Kazimira Zimina, whose bracingly visceral and ritualistic works scorch through contemporary moving image like a refreshingly cleansing flame.
This event is organised by CineSalon and supported by Sirius Arts Centre. It is free and un-ticketed.
2point4 Hour Film Challenge - CineSalon x oNo NoNo
Cork Theatre Collective Studio; Saturday December 6th 3pm-5.24pm
Participants will have 2.4 hours to devise and shoot a silent experimental short on their phones. Once shooting is complete filmmakers will become members of a noise orchestra, live-scoring the soundtrack to each other’s films. You will need: your phone.
Also feel free to come in costume, and to bring a prop!
A collaboration between oNo NoNo and CineSalon, as part of CineSalon Experimental Film Festival 2025. The completed films will be compiled and screened in a special CineSalon online programme.
This is a free event but spaces are limited. Book your Ticket Here.
oNo NoNo is a community-powered event series facilitated by Lucía Dwyer and Benjamin Burns. Held monthly in Cork, it’s a playful, welcoming space for artists, musicians, thinkers, movers and anyone curious to co-create in a shared sonic and creative experience. At its heart, oNo NoNo is an improvised sound session, but it is so much more. It invites and encourages all forms of expression, drawing, poetry, dance, noise, storytelling, movement, or just good listening.
CineSalon Open Call Short Films Programme 1
UCC Film & Screen Media Auditorium; Sunday 7th December 12pm
A programme combining short films by Cork- and Ireland-based artists with a selection from the best of CineSalon’s international short film programme.
Dancing Barefoot (Sarah Kelly & Graham McSweeney)
The Wishing Whale (burke)
Detritus (Deborah S. Philips)
A Woman of Darkest Deeds (Chris O’Neill)
Our Shadows at Noon (Lucia Dwyer)
Journeys through Temperature (Sarah Lincoln & White Ash)
Vort_i_city (Vicki Davis)
Smoke (Erica Schreiner)
1001 Melodies Into The Blood Moon Fire (Kristina Borysova)
An Ode To Daisy Lawn (Ailís Sionna Murphy)
Shapeless Variations (Francisco Rojas)
This event is free and un-ticketed.
CineSalon Artist in Focus: Michael Higgins Artist Talk + ATAMAN Premiere
UCC Film & Screen Media Auditorium; Sunday 7th December 2.30pm
CineSalon’s 2025 artist in focus is Michael Higgins, one of the legends of Irish experimental cinema. His restless and prolific body of work is marked by a uniquely dreamlike sense of narrative and atmosphere, and constant experimentation with formats and technical processes. Based in Kilkenny, his practice merges the analogue and digital to explore themes of perception, memory, and landscape. His work often dissolves boundaries between fiction and documentary, favouring tactile, process-based approaches. His films include At One Fell Swoop, Autumnal Sleeps, 95B and most recently A Shooting on Brandon. A core member of the Experimental Film Society (EFS) project since 2010, he co-founded the Out of Focus Film Festival alongside Juana Robles in 2024. This platform for alternative cinema is based in Kilkenny and also curates screenings and video installations in collaboration with The Butler Gallery.
In this session, Higgins will present a career-ranging artist talk followed by the premiere of a characteristically surprising, mysterious and mesmeric new work, ATAMAN.
ATAMAN: Episode 1 – PILOT (Michael Higgins)
ATAMAN is no-one. ATAMAN is no-where. ATAMAN is no-when. ATAMAN is a series of films in the science-fiction genre that combine pre-recorded material and live editing, music and performance. It is a cosmic entity born from the conjoint womb of John Atma, Oli Ryan and Michael Higgins.
This event is free and un-ticketed.
CineSalon Open Call Short Films Programme 2
UCC Film & Screen Media Auditorium, Sunday 7th December 4.30pm
A programme combining short films by Cork- and Ireland-based artists with a selection from the best of CineSalon’s international short film programme.
The Banshee Who Lost Her Voice (Ciaran Shanahan)
Synthetic Forest (Jesed Moreno)
This Place (Christina Bennett)
The Pupil (Sarah Ellen Lundy)
On Leaving You (Vanessa Gildea)
Nothing Exists Until It Moves (Hutchinson | Kemp)
Taking Space (Helio León)
An Unfinished Cathedral Reaches Almost for the Sky (Bob Gallagher)
Coalescence (Arran Tenzin Bradstock)
Re-Membering (Sophia Felumaz Santabarbara)
This event is free and un-ticketed.
Film Performance: Artem Trofimenko & Awen – A Ladder on the Edge of Living
UCC Film & Screen Media Auditorium; Sunday 7th December 6pm
The closing event of the festival is a performance by Artem Trofimenko and Awen. Emerging from a site-responsive exploration at Pedvāle Art Park, Latvia, A Ladder on the Edge of Living is a film and live performance in response to folk memory, between the haunted logic of Viy and the drifting consciousness of Solaris.
Artem Trofimenko is an Irish-Ukrainian artist based in Cork. His practice traverses film, performance, and photographic installation to explore the poetics of displacement - how memory and perception inhabit the body, and how the act of seeing becomes a form of exile. Working with analogue film, darkroom processes, and found light, he traces invisible currents between landscape and the inner world, translating unconscious states into material gestures. He approaches film as a tactile medium - something to be touched, scratched, and breathed through - while performance reintroduces the body as a reactive site. In December 2025, Artem will develop a new performance and present /f/XILE during a residency at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh.
Awen, originally from the U.S. and now based in Cork, is a multidisciplinary artist working at the crossroads of puppetry, performance and installation. Her work animates the inanimate, stirring what has forgotten how to move. Through ritual theatre, object manipulation, and experimental film she explores themes of innocence, impermanence, and transmutation. Her intention is to offer those who encounter the work momentary access to the soft places, where vulnerability and wonder meet.
This event is free and un-ticketed.