Cork Film Festival: Leeside musical heroes front and centre of Free Radicals short-film screening

“I hadn't made a film in several years, due to the pandemic happening, but I’d gotten rather restless and had wanted to do something, wanted to make a new film,” says filmmaker Chris O’Neill over the phone, as he digs into the background of his latest short piece, and the curiosity and restlessness that spurred him on. 

“I had several cans of old-school celluloid film stock in storage in my freezer, and decided, ‘well, now's about time to use it, like, it's been sitting there for eight years’. I kept holding off, trying to wait for the project, and I just said, ‘that's it, I'm going to do it now’.

“So I pulled all my resources together, got a creative team of people behind the camera, did a crowdfunding campaign online, and the result is this movie. Based on the response so far from people who've seen it, it seems to be something that folks are responding to, so it's great that it's getting its world premiere at the Cork International Film Festival.”

‘A Woman of the Darkest Deeds’ takes the form of a tableau of ‘dreams, fantasies and memories’ shared by two different women in the midst of complex feelings for each other, while examining the motivations of a pair of mysterious manipulators, seemingly at either end of the old moral understandings.

“So, this must be my thirtieth short film, and many of them are experimental, and I’ve experimented with different forms of filmmaking through those short films. One thing I often have in my films is portraiture of female faces, either in a dramatic setting, or an abstract setting. I liked the idea in this film of using that portraiture in a visual sense, to tell one story while the visual, while the audio is also telling a similar story, but the two of them aren't connected.

“What I mean by that is, the actors aren't speaking dialogue, but there is dialogue being heard over these still-life images. So the dialogue is inspired by watching an old movie once, where I decided I liked the content of it; I transcribed it, re-edited it, completely changed it from its original source, and had each of the performers read out this dialogue in voiceover form, which was then added to the movie later.

“We have this wonderful composer called Gabby Bam Bam, who's based in the US, and she did this incredible soundtrack, so you have this eerie kind of soundtrack going on, you have these disembodied voices running as well, and then you have these, I hope, striking images in both colour and monochrome of female portraiture, which add up to… it's for the audience to make their own mind up, exactly what the content of the film is: that by the end of it, it’s open to interpretation.” 

Alongside himself and illustrator Jess Hourigan, the film’s cast features Cork psych-rock anti-hero Elaine Malone as one of the tormented protagonists, while the more virtuous of the puppeteers is portrayed by avant-garde artist, noise-maker and film experimentalist Vicky Langan - in itself an intersection of defiant Leeside creation and expression.

“It's interesting, because I like to work in a way that, on one hand, is really rigid and planned out, and on the other hand, is open to creativity on the set. I had a set plan for how this film was going to look, and what I mean by that is, we shot on two different kinds of film stock - one in colour, one in black and white. The stock for the monochrome shots was very grainy, high contrast-y, and the colour stock is really beautiful, luminous reds and greens and those kinds of colours.

“I had these very precise images in my head of how I wanted them to unfold, but I left it open to see how it would be once the cast was actually performing it," says O’Neill of the dynamics between cast . 

“They're not acting traditionally, as in, interacting with each other between dialogue, dramatic moments or whatever, but nevertheless, when you put two people together in a frame, you see how they interact, with each other, visually, with screen presence.

“A lot of that was based on the performers. There were four actors in the film: Vicky Langan, Elaine Malone, Jess Hourigan and myself. And y’know, once people were either singularly on the screen, or put together on the screen, I think there was an interesting dynamic, and we did, while filming, occasionally decide to change certain shots based on that screen dynamic.” 

The film is part of the Festival’s Free Radicals programme, selected and compiled by festival veteran and Echo Downtown resident Don O’Mahony, and showcasing experimental work from Irish film-makers. It’s far from O’Neill’s first time on the billing, but his excitement amid a changing of the programming guard, is evident.

“This is my eighth film playing at the festival, and my third time being a part of the Free Radicals programme. I think this year's programme, overall at the festival, is great. I think the new director of programming, Aurelie Godet, has done a fantastic job, and Don, who oversees the Free Radicals programme, he’s done a great job.

“The beauty of experimental cinema is that it’s people experimenting with audiovisual forms to convey some sort of thought or comment, or sometimes a story, some sort of theme, whatever it might be - and it's really exciting to see these different visions come together.” 

• Cork International Film Festival’s ‘Free Radicals’ programme of short film plays at the Arc Cinema on North Main Street, on Saturday November 16th. Screen time is 8.45pm, tickets €13.50 from corkfilmfest.org.