Shorts Focus: Still Voices Film Festival Dance Roundtable

We are thrilled to be once again partnering with Still Voices Film Festival to bring you a series of podcasts with artists featured at the international film festival located in the heart of Ireland.

In this Dance-themed podcast, Niamh Creely talks to the creators behind 3 films that screen at this year’s festival.

In Velvet (Jessica Kennedy & Megan Kennedy)

A child sits alone on a beach. A man approaches and they set off on a journey, driving through the Irish landscape of green parks and stunted suburbs. A herd of deer graze nearby with their antlers peeling away: a shedding to transform into something new.There is an unsettled empty space that hangs between the child and the man. Will they continue on the road together or apart?

In Velvet is a short dance film created by the award winning company Junk Ensemble and commissioned by Irish Arts Centre | New York City.

amser/time (Deborah Light)

In the intertidal zone, between land and sea, three people move through three remarkable sites along Bae Ceredigion/Cardigan Bay. We start 20,000 years ago and arrive at today’s climate crisis.

Sarn Gynfelyn is revealed every low tide and looks like a road into the sea. In fact, it is a glacial moraine laid down 20,000 years ago when ice sheets melted, it marks the beginning of the global conditions that have enabled human expansion. At Borth a 6,000 year old forest flourished for a few thousand years. Submerged by the sea, it has since been re-exposed in recent storms. Sarn Gynfelyn and Borth’s forest are cited as supporting the Cantre’r Gwaelod legend of lost fertile lands in Cardigan Bay, but the geology tells a different story. Moving forwards, we arrive at Fairbourne, a seaside town built on saltmarsh and English industrial wealth. It is now set to become the first UK town to be decommissioned due to sea level rise. It will be demolished and returned to salt marsh and will have existed for less than 200 years.

On Mending (Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern & Emilie Louise Leriche)

A reflection on the beauty and inevitability of impermanence, On Mending is a short dance film that follows a community’s attempt to process overwhelming loss. The film and its characters wind their way through a vast and barren alpine landscape, an abstract land of memory and nostalgia. At its root On Mending is a contemplation on support, on community, on the action of releasing what we can no longer carry with us.

Still Voices Film Festival runs from November 9th – 13th 2022.

https://www.stillvoicesfilmfestival.com/

https://filmireland.net/