Part-time projectionist and amateur filmmaker, John Kline Jnr, is mute and suffers from missing time. He hires local actors to play his parents in a series of recreated home movies in order to investigate their unsolved disappearance 25 years earlier.
Hole in the Head is an experimental-narrative in which the protagonist re-stages his family’s home movies in order to recall a traumatic event. Melding new with old technologies and a film-within-a-film structure, Hole in the Head proposes a hauntological discourse on autofiction, trauma and private ritual, complete with a dark Irish humour.
Placed at no. 39 in the Irish Times’s Top 50 Films of 2022, Kavanagh’s multi-layered, multi-formatted approach investigates questions of memory and the increasing role of technology in the mediation of experience in a manner evocative of Atom Egoyan, and undoubtedly rewards repeat viewings.
The screenings will be followed by Q&A with director Dean Kavanagh and producer Anja Mahler.
Screening Dates:
Friday 12 April – 19:00
Saturday 13 April – 18:00
The German premiere at Filmfest Bremen is presented in collaboration with the Irish Film Institute’s IFI
International programme. The film is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland
Dean Kavanagh is a writer-director from Ireland, who has created 70 shorts and 6 feature films in the field of experimental cinema over the past 15 years. His cinema intricately forges a new relationship between contemporary and legacy media formats, while combining materialist film methodologies with a focus on narrative structures. Fusing experimental form with narrative storytelling, his work has been described as part of an important new direction in Irish cinema. Professor and scholar, Ciara Chambers wrote that Kavanagh “paves the way for other filmmakers to share experimental work unapologetically with ‘mainstream’ audiences.” Dean is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Artists’ Award (2018) and was selected as Ireland’s Berlinale Talent for the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival.
Anja Mahler, producer, is a German visual artist and archivist based in Ireland. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Ireland’s National College of Art and Design and has developed a successful practice in the field of time-based art since 2010. The essential element of her work is the passage and manipulation of time through the expressive use of moving image technology and the human body. Her research interest is in media archaeology, specifically the cognitive impact of early and contemporary cinema. Her work has received support from the Arts Council of Ireland, and she is a recipient of the Next Generation Artist Award.