Tension Structures

The story of Irish farmer Thomas Reid who, for years, has been locked in a grueling battle with his neighbor - U.S. microchip manufacturer Intel who want to expand into Reid’s land.

This is a beautiful and poetic cinematic ode to our moon. Made primarily from international cinematic archives in combination with literary fragments and original moonlit cinematography filmed across five continents, To the Moon steps lightly through the ages and ideas that people have drawn from the moon to create a meditative work.

‘The Great Wall has been completed at its most southerly point.’ So begins Kafka’s short story ‘At the Building of the Great Wall of China’, and so, at Europe’s heavily militarised south-eastern frontier, begins this film. In the shadow of its own narratives of freedom, Europe has been quietly building its own great wall. Like its famous Chinese precursor, this wall has been piecemeal in construction, diverse in form and dubious in utility. Gradually cohering across the continent, this system of enclosure and exclusion is urged upon a populace seemingly willing to accept its necessity and to contribute to its building.

In 1946, a young forester was dispatched to the north of Finland to find trees large enough to serve as electricity poles in Ireland. The only surviving record of his hazardous mission are a few telegrams he sent to the home front. Directors Feargal Ward and Adrian Duncan literally follow in his footsteps in this tough trek through the subarctic wilderness, captured in dreamlike, hallucinatory scenes. The fantastic soundscape with high-pitched, sparse tones only intensifies the sense of desolation and mystery.

Naofumi Yximalloo Ishimaru is an obscure cult musician who has spent most of his 57 years on the fringes of music and society. Perennially uncertain of what he wants, Naofumi is constantly moving - drawing people to him before pushing them away and setting out alone once more.

'Living in a Coded Land' is a poetic and imaginative film essay that makes unexpected links between events and locations, history and contemporary life. The film revolves around the notion of a sense of place and stories associated with place, reflecting on the subterranean traces of the past in the present and probing themes such as the impact of colonialism, emigration, the famine, land, housing and the place of art in society. Making extensive use of archive from RTÉ and the IFI, the film seeks to explore the more elusive layers of meaning that make up this country.

A silent-film love story told through a public sculpture in Berlin of the 19th-Century Romantic-era poets Bettina and Achim von Arnim.

In a remote forest in northwest Germany, an urban combat facility called “Tin City” is used to train British soldiers before deployment in Northern Ireland. A bar, a bank, a shop – each location reveals another iteration of the same macabre set-up.

Floating Structures follows a researcher travelling across central and southern Europe seeking out an array of buildings and structures that seem as though they have emerged from another world. Our mysterious guide, drawing on the ideas and visions of the great Irish engineer Peter Rice, explores the hinterlands that surround and gave rise to these structures. It is a rail trip of revelation that wanders from the quiet Bavarian town of Haßfurt, to the inner and outer realms of Paris, to the Andalusian city of Seville. Suspended artefacts and ruins from the distant future and the industrial past are sifted through and interlinked with precision and wonder.

An Irish geologist teaching in Italy gets a call from a Berlin hospital: her estranged father, whom she hasn't seen for over 30 years, is unconscious after a fall. As his next of kin, she is asked to come to Berlin. Over the course of a night in her father's Berlin apartment she learns from his diaries about a trip he took with a friend to Italy in the early 2000s to research fascist-era buildings and sculptures. It is a trip that ended in tragedy. Latina, Latina is a timely and moving hybrid-documentary that looks at a political ideology through the objects and buildings it left behind.