Aemi Dissolutions '25 Programme Launch | Experimental Film Festival
- The Complex
- Sep 5
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 11
Location: The Depot @ The Complex, 12 Mary's Abbey, Smithfield, Dublin 7, D07 XR70
Date: Fri-Sun, 26-28 Sept
Tickets: Day passes and full weekend tickets are available here
Note: The latest programme updates can be found here
The Complex is proud to host Aemi for this year's edition of DISSOLUTIONS film festival.
The experimental festival takes place from Friday, September 26th, to Sunday, September 28th. It features screenings, workshops, and discussions showcasing the best of Irish and international artist film practice. Single-day and full weekend tickets are available now.
Aemi Dissolutions Schedule 2025
Opening Event: 'A Fidai Film' by Kamal Aljafari
Date: Fri, 26 Sept
Time: 6pm
Aemi intentionally chose 'A Fidai Film' to open the festival this year, as a statement of continued solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. 'A Fidai Film' is a reclamation of the archive collection of photos and film from the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut seized by the IDF in 1982.
‘The film is a treasure trove of footage about Palestinian life before and after the Nakba, accompanied by a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner and texts by writers including Gassan Kanafani. Each image and montage embody history and art, longing and sadness and resistance and sabotage’ (IDFA 2024).
'Against Stasis'
Date: Fri, 26 Sept
Time: 8.30pm
A programme in two parts of works by the eight participating artists in aemi's inaugural Tier 2 programme. Featuring work by Michael Barwise, Chloe Brenan, Yurika Higashikawa, Colm Higgins, Jack Hogan, Ann Upton, Luke van Gelderen and Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz.
Both parts of this screening will be followed by a conversation among the Tier 2 artists.
fanvid- 'Making Do'
Date: Sat, 27 Sept
Time: 12pm
‘Making do’ is a nod to self-sufficiency, but also to the handmade, craft approach taken by the artists featured, from collaged archive footage and manipulated online content to hand-drawn stop motion, written letters and engraved coins.
'Our Tongues in Exile'
Date: Sat, 27 Sept
Time: 3pm
Curated by Media City Film Festival’s Artistic Director Oona Mosna, ‘Our Tongues in Exile’ gathers films by artists and directors working across continents, generations, and cinematic languages who—along with hundreds of other international co-conspirators—have played formative roles in the development of the festival’s storied history across the last 20 years.
'Long-Life Witness' – Films by Basma al-Sharif
Date: Sat, 27 Sept
Time: 6.30pm
This programme curated by Diaa Lagan brings together seminal works by Basma Alsharif presented in chronological order to illuminate the development of her practice from earlier works to more recent explorations.
'Peter, Paul and Mary' (on 16mm)
Date: Sat, 27 Sept
Time: 10pm
Following on from a late night screening of psychedelic experimental shorts at last year’s festival this programme looks at three key figures from three different generations all innovating approaches to the film form.
'Black Nations/Queer Nations?' (1995)
Date: Sun, 28 Sept
Time: 2.30pm
Shari Frilot's Black Nations/Queer Nations? (1995) exemplifies how the multiple, the erotic, the cyber and the spiritual are tools needed to shape a future. Selected by Clodagh Assata Boyce, who will lead a Q&A with Dr John Wilkins after the screening
‘Lunar Stones’
Date: Sun, 28 Sept
Time: 5pm
Featuring Irish premieres of new films by Sarah Ballard, Calum Hill, Maeve Brennan and Jesse Jones 'Lunar Stones' seeks to reflect on and further complicate ideas of spectatorship established at the outset of the festival.
Closing Event: 'On A Paving Stone Mounted'
Date: Sun, 28 Sept
Time: 8.30pm
The closing event is a very special screening of Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s remarkable impressionistic survey of the Irish immigrant experience On a Paving Stone Mounted, featuring contributions from the likes of Stephen Rea, Gabriel Byrne, Mannix Flynn, and Christy Moore.
Screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Thaddeus O’Sullivan and other contributors to the film.
