Ursa Minor

A constellation of films that move in and out of relationships with each other, Ursa Minor is this year’s selection of artist and experimental film brought together by aemi for GAZE. Bound up with each other through shifting ideas of landscape, death and stardom, the works in this programme from Colm Higgins, Jennifer Mehigan, P. Staff, Kenneth Anger and Juana Robles invoke dream-like states where quotidian practices like getting dressed or making butter assume queer and otherworldly qualities. Collisions of private and public, material and immaterial proliferate throughout and the pain and suffering endured by the body is pierced by fleeting moments of pleasure, interspecies kinship and purposeful abandon. aemi is an Arts Council-funded organisation dedicated to the support and development of artist film in Ireland. For more details visit www.aemi.ie 

There will be a post screening Q&A with filmmakers. 

1hr 8m + in-conversation 

The Legend of the Dun Cow 

A camp and luscious exploration of butter and the sensorial experience of agricultural practice. Combining intense documentary footage with tableaus and original music, the film is a playful take on the place of the cow in the Irish consciousness. 

Colm Higgins/ Ireland/ 2024/ 19m 

Honeysuckle Joyride 

Honeysuckle Joyride is a commissioned video essay made in response to Bassam Al-Sabah’s show I AM ERROR which opened at Gasworks London in 2021. The essay considers themes of decay, inter-species kinship and the Irish landscape through a post-humanist lens. Footage of various locations around the island are layered with computer-generated imagery, uncovering personal or domestic materialities of queerness, grief and horror as they intersect with the screen, and ideas of truth and reality in a space where public and private spheres are constantly colliding with and abstracting each other. 

Jennifer Mehigan/ Ireland/ 2022/ 13m 

Hevn 

Combining digital and analogue film-makingtechniques with poetry, hand-painted animation and industrial sound, Hevn explores pleasure and pain in sick or debilitated bodies, with Staff’s ongoing interest in the volatility of queer and trans bodies. Glimpses of footage — a shower scene, traffic, friends gathering – are obscured and revealed by layers of hand painted film and lettering, eventually giving way to a titular poem that asks what happens to us in states of dreaming, volatility, inebriation and exhaustion. 

P. Staff/ UK/ 2022/ 5m 

Puce Moment 

Made over a decade before the original publication of his notorious Hollywood Babylon, underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger produced this short film, intending it to form part of a longer project. Starring Yvonne Marquis, the film follows her around her apartment as she gets dressed and ends just before she goes out to walk her four Borzoi dogs. Shot in colour in the late 1940s and featuring a psychedelic folk rock soundtrack from the 1960s, this is an uncanny invocation of decadence and decline. 

Kenneth Anger/ US/ 1949/ 6m 

Alicia 

Originally shot on Super 8mm film and partially blown up to 16mm for the creation of collages made up of abstract and composed photograms, the film explores in a medium specific way the self-experimental search for artistic, gender and sexual identity of Zurich-based movement artist/teacher and former architect Toma Alice Péronnet (they, them, theirs).

Juana Robles/ Ireland/ 2024/ 25m