The Story of Drifting Cities

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep is a hypnotic and oneiric cinematic poem composed from footage Michael Higgins shot on the road across Alberta and BC, Canada. Photographed on Super 8mm and using hand-processed film techniques to create an unworldly zone between sleep and wakefulness, it looks at three characters and the film’s material that connects them. It is a film that invites the viewer to sleep with the film’s protagonists, to drift across into the dream world of the film’s material and lose touch with their current surroundings.

Funnel Web Family Refrigerated is a refrigerated version of the 13 minute Funnel Web Family i.e. it lasts longer. Similar to the defrosted version it is a prying look at the creatures that inhabit a home. Shot using an early form of wireless CCTV camera technology it places the viewer in an intense voyeuristic position which at times generates a sense of unease and atmospheric disturbance. However with such horror comes a sense of relief and comfort.

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

Entirely shot one frame at a time the project looks at the craft of filmmaking filtered through thematic lenses of ritual, desire and horror, themes often found in genre film. It presents and examines some of the tools and elements that are involved to create such sensational effects while remaining fundamentally a very hands-on craft.

A totemic walkabout through a single cycle of John Moriarty’s Dreamtime, the film is a waking nightmare. The textures and patterns, light and shadows and the very material of sound and image construct an experience that re-realises our cultural past, present and future in one metamorphic breath.