Michael Higgins

In the time of Ireland's Great Famine, an elderly gravedigger revisits a traumatic event through the decaying visions of his fragmented dreams.

In a remote rural estate house, a woman sleeps, she is alone. It’s a time not far from the dawn of the moving image, the obsessed and wealthy Dr. Epstein engineers a number of scientific experiments. He subjects his adopted children, Pete and Re-Pete, along with his darling flapper, Baby Dee, to his various scientific tasks. Things take a decidedly strange turn when Epstein makes a deal with some shifty-looking vagabonds. On doing so he opens a door to the unknown, ruptures the fabric of time and unleashes a shadow-like character bent on reducing all those he encounters to dust.

Phantom Islands is an experimental film that exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. It follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that ultimately results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.

Featuring Brandon Hill, County Kilkenny, Ireland. Elevation: 515 meters, the highest point in Co. Kilkenny, situated near the River Barrow and the town of Graiguenamanagh. Composed of granite from the Leinster Granite Batholith, formed during the late Carboniferous period, approximately 300 million years ago. A personal multi-layered essay film that positions Kilkenny's highest peak, Brandon Hill, as the main protagonist. Through various alternative documentary methods, home movies and re-enactments the film explores the past and present mutual effects between a geographical location and its people.

A documentary like no other. Starting with the bizarre practices and fantasies of a group of filmmakers working under the label Experimental Film Society, it spins off into a manifesto of light and sound. This dazzling journey through a view of cinema as cosmic ritual and erotic delirium is also an idiosyncratic celebration of the medium itself. Rouzbeh Rashidi’s ornate visual style unleashes a parade of visionary scenes that redefine movie magic as a fevered hallucination.

Short film by Michael Higgins.

At One Fell Swoop deals with a stone carver and his metamorphic wander through rural Ireland. In passing he slips through the film’s frames into a re-imagining of his surroundings in which he finds himself trapped in a flickering, shifting world of shadows on an intense cataclastic path towards a dead end. Photographed anamorphically on expired 16mm black and white film with a 50year old hand-cranked camera and entirely hand-processed At One Fell Swoop resembles a phantom-like film lodged amid multiple stratums of time and space.

Two actors play two lovers before meeting death in a car crash. They drift through muddled memories and moments in search of one another.