Feature Films
Solitaire
(72 mins, 2023)
Blissed
(74 mins, 2022)
Blissed is an experimental love story, both lyrical and graphic. Hovering in the sensuous haze where flesh and dream become one, it wordlessly explores the shared inner life of two people whose devotion to one another expresses itself in forms that still challenge convention. Sexually frank and poetically immersive, this plunge into one couple’s erotic utopia features an original soundtrack by Mick O’Shea.
This film feels as if an early-career Alexander Sokurov has adapted a novel by JG Ballard - Rouzbeh Rashidi
Whale Skull
(83 mins, 2019)
Set in the near future, Whale Skull sifts the fragments of an imploded cinematic landscape in the search for clues to move forward. Shifting back and forth through flashbacks of impending cataclysm and its eerie aftermath, this broiling collage mixes viscerally playful bargain basement sci-fi with a lyrical consideration of personal experimental cinema.
This film was made to mark the twentieth anniversary of Experimental Film Society and includes contributions from other EFS filmmakers as a celebration of this group’s collaborative spirit. Short Super-8 sequences by Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Vicky Langan, Michael Higgins and Jann Clavadetscher are included along with additional material by Rouzbeh Rashidi.
Cloud of Skin
(84 mins, 2015)
Deeply haunted by the memory of his dead lover, a man (Dean Kavanagh) wanders through the sites of their encounters. The dead woman (Eadaoin O’Donoghue), a blind visionary, has transferred her perceptual powers to him as part of their undying bond. Rather than unfolding as a traditional narrative, Cloud of Skin takes the form of a visually and sonically immersive fever dream. Composer Karen Power’s intense soundscapes complete this mysterious and compelling cinematic experience.
Though formally unconventional, this work is as accessible as it is beguiling. It is the work of a filmmaker who for years has tirelessly pushed an Irish underground cinema to the surface and is here at the peak of his powers.
- Sunniva O’Flynn, Irish Film Institute
[Le Cain] offers us an image-rubble in both form and content, in both the numerous properties he gives to the images as we can never know from one shot to the next whether it will be in monochrome or colour, will be a long shot or a close up, a desaturated or over-saturated image. If this may seem to border on the arbitrary then that would be the lesser of two evils if the alternative happens to be convention. By untethering the film from a plot, and refusing the strictures of the Structural, Le Cain is left with a film that is free but that is then in a constant state of tension with its own arbitrariness.
- Tony McKibbin, The Fabric of Appearances
Damp Access
(72 mins, 2014)
Damp Access is a uniquely personal meditation on the landscape of Cork City, a sort of oneiric diary film that invests heavily in the evocative textures of VHS. It features a soundtrack by Mick O'Shea and Paul Hegarty.
Lately, I’ve had a recurring vision: to make a video as someone from another planet. I’ve also been thinking that there’s a lot in this cinema that’s ritual, that offers the conditions for a ritual to take place when it starts to occur. A film that is a ritual and which proposes a ritual, like an expanded cinema which is another expanded cinema. One which expands itself through the images towards the spectators. Which establishes a connection between the screen and their brains, a union I like to visualize as an organic cathode ray tube of millions of colours or greenish, vibrant, terrifying but taking me where it wants me to go. Damp Access offers these possibilities.
– Jorge Núñez, Fuerza Vital
