City as Character – Film Programme

City as Character is a film programme co-curated by Butler Gallery and Out of Focus and is affiliated with the current exhibition Cities of the World. These films highlight iconic cities in both mainstream and art house cinema. In partnership with Kilkenny Arts Festival, Watergate Theatre, and Out of Focus.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 1/11 - Starting 9th August

Rema Nascentes (Sources of Spring), 2021, directed by Ж (15mins)
SÃO PAULO
A place-specific film-excavation of Bixiga neighbourhood -São Paulo. Choreography of forces that cross present time.

Serial Parallels, 2019, directed by Max Hattler (9 mins)
HONG KONG
This experimental animation approaches Hong Kong’s built environment from the conceptual perspective of celluloid film, by applying the technique of film animation to the photographic image. The city’s signature architecture of horizon-eclipsing housing estates is reimagined as parallel rows of film strips: Serial Parallels.

Under the paving stones, the beach, 2019, directed by Amanda Katz (16 mins)
BROOKLYN, NY
On Brooklyn's East River waterfront, a new park built on tenuous ground, a new residence converted from a formerly industrial shell, a promise of lives of convenience. A film that circles around rhythms of labor and leisure.

Nightworld, 2019, directed by Adam Smith (6 mins)
CHONGQING, CHINA
In China’s pulsating, neon-lit megacity of Chongqing, two deaf-mute daredevils scale skyscrapers by night to take epic snapshots of themselves for their social media following.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 2/11 - Starting 20th August

Buses don't stop here anymore, 2024, directed by Penny McCann (8 mins)
OTTAWA
Filmed on Ektachrome Super 8 over a three year period from the sudden closure of the Greyhound station in April 2020 to its demolition in 2022, Buses don’t stop here anymore speaks to the profound loss of long-distance bus travel in hundreds of small towns and cities across Canada.

PUHELINKOPPI, 2007, directed by Hope Tucker (8 mins)
HELSINKI
You'll need a phone of your own to make a phone call in Finland.

Terrain Vague, 2020, directed by Edward Kihn (48 mins)
PHILADELPHIA
Terrain Vague is a 16mm photo-roman, based on the images and accompanying log of a fictional female researcher who, over the summer of 2016, chronicles the development of a new private, university-based innovation centre from the shell of a former colour and coatings laboratory in a poor and working class Southwest Philadelphia neighbourhood - an industrial hub that shuttered in the wake of the crisis of 2008.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 3/11 - Starting 27th August

Golzheim, 2022, directed by Neringa Naujokaite (13 mins)
DÜSSELDORF
The film depicts the controversial atmosphere in one neighbourhood in the north of Dusseldorf. The different architectural structures – the monumental Nordpark (North Park) built by National Socialists, the "white settlement" Golzheimer-Siedlung with its high-priced one-family homes for the wealthy, the Jewish retirement home and the temporary refugee camp made of containers – are all located side-by-side on a single axis along the Rhine. The connecting link is Nordpark, where all the inhabitants of this neighbourhood, who live next door to each other yet in different worlds, meet one another.

TERRAMOTOURISM (Earthquake Tourism), 2016, directed by Left Hand Rotation Collective (43 mins)
LISBON

On 1 November 1755 an earthquake destroyed the city of Lisbon. Its impact was such that it displaced man from the centre of creation. Its ruins legitimised Enlightened Despotism. Lisbon today is trembling again, shaken by a tourist earthquake that transforms the city at cruising speed. It’s impact displaces the inhabitant of the centre of the city. What new absolutisms will find their alibi here? As the right to the city collapses, drowned by the discourse of identity and the authentic, the city creaks announcing the collapse and the urgency of a new way of looking at us, of reacting to a transformation, this time predictable, that the despair of the Capitalism pretends inevitable.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 4/11 - Starting 3rd September

Klostės, 2022, directed by Aideen Barry (67 mins)
KAUNAS, LITHUANIA
The film explores the city's modernist architecture and hidden histories through the lens of community collaboration. Over 500 children and young people participated in its production, with workshops focusing on prop-making, animation, and direction. Local dancers and musicians also contributed, creating political dance and modernist scores. The film uses a combination of techniques, including stop-motion animation, contemporary dance, and silent film elements.

TWENTYTИƎWT, 2023, directed by Max Hattler (6 mins)
HONG KONG
Shot entirely from an apartment on the 36th floor of a high-rise building, the images in this experimental animation survey large parts of Hong Kong’s cityscape, drawing attention to the individual lives hidden inside its buildings - together alone, collectively sequestered. Initially recorded in 2020 during lockdown and completed in 2023 with the advantage of critical distance, TWENTYTИƎWT (“Twenty-Twenty”) attempts to encapsulate the darkness, confinement, and uncertainty of the year of the global pandemic.

Madrid, Études, 2024, directed by Jimmy Schaus (11 mins)
MADRID
A mix of orchestrated and observed scenarios and actions play out across Madrid over the course of a day, splintered and shuffled through in-camera edits and multiple exposures. Isis awakens to find the Temple of Debod dislocated from ancient Egypt to the centre of the modern city, meanwhile an urban phantasmagoria unfolds. The film consists of four 100' rolls of Ektachrome, edited in-camera and spliced together.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 5/11 - Starting 10th September

London Symhpony, 2017, directed by Alex Barrett (72 mins)
LONDON
London Symphony is a contemporary silent film - a city symphony - which offers a poetic journey through the city of London. It is an artistic snapshot of the city as it stands today, and a celebration of its culture and diversity.

Huntington Drive, 2015, directed by Kate Lain (5 mins)
LOS ANGELES
This piece comprises various types of documentation of a single trip along the entire length of Huntington Drive, a 16-mile long street that passes through nine cities in Los Angeles County.

Urban Growth, 2020, directed by Nate Dorr & Nathan Kensinger (13 mins)
NEW YORK
For more than 40 years, a collection of abandoned mansions have been hidden inside a wild growing forest in the heart of Brooklyn. But in a quick-developing city, no place is forgotten for long.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 6/11 - Starting 17th September

Images of a Moving City, 2014, directed by Karel Doing (35 mins)
ROTTERDAM
With particular alertness to trivialities, director Karel Doing made a documentary poem about the city of Rotterdam and its inhabitants. In a series of contrasting black-and-white images, Doing observes the people, roads and buildings that jointly determine the atmosphere of a continually changing multicultural city.

Janela, 2016, directed by Left Hand Rotation Collective (22 mins)
LISBON
Through a window in Lisbon the city manifests itself, distracted from its industrial past. The exterior is meticulously renovated, preparing for the great arrival of visitors. A documentary filmed from home, as far as the zoom reaches.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 7/11 - Starting 24th September

Damp Access, 2013, directed by Max Le Cain (72 mins)
CORK CITY
Damp Access is a uniquely personal meditation on the now much-altered landscape of Cork City, a VHS-textured relic imbued with the dream record of an urban space in the process of being forgotten. It features a soundtrack by Mick O'Shea and Paul Hegarty.

Twin City Sympathies, 2025, directed by David Matthew Johnson (4 mins)
MINNEAPOLIS / MINNESOTA
Twin City Sympathies is represented through repeating visuals of Hennepin Ave Bridge, heading towards the heart of downtown on a foggy day. The narration representing half of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, voicing the ironically surface level kindness of Minnesota Nice. Passive aggressive, but friendly - warmly welcoming, but coldly distant. Johnson relates these defining Minnesota traits to his own personal expression of self.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 8/11 - Starting 1st October

Saint-Louis on the move, 2022, directed by Kita Bauchet (32 mins)

SAINT-LOUIS, SENEGAL
The result of a collaboration between the Senegalese contemporary dance company Diagn'art and the Belgian and Swiss artists Kita Bauchet and Stéphanie Pfister, Saint-Louis on the move presents a subjective sketch of the city and the rhythm of its daily life. An exploration of Saint-Louis through several choreographies performed by 2 dancers and 2 cameras, on Siegfried Canto’s music that highlight the cities energy and the fierce creativity of its youth.

(Screening To Be Confirmed) Invisible City: La Materia non Conta, 2020, directed by Pierre Commault (44 mins)
RIJEKA, CROATIA

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 9/11 - Starting 8th October

Hades of Limbo, 2012, directed by Rouzbeh Rashidi (82 mins)
TEHRAN
Presenting a stark and enigmatic depiction of life in modern-day Iran, this film consciously chooses to sidestep overt social commentary. Instead, it priorities an intensely personal perspective of lives trapped under invisible constraints. Directed remotely from Ireland over the Internet by Rouzbeh Rashidi, the production process of Hades of Limbo echoes the sense of alienation it encapsulates. The remote direction underscores the thematic estrangement and adds an intriguing layer to the film's creation, making it even more mysterious.

Los Angeles II, 2017, directed by Angela Ferraiolo (3 mins)
LOS ANGELES
Part of LA’s glamour is the tension it maintains between chaos and order. One moment LA is pure elegance, the next the city seems to be pulling itself apart. Los Angeles II was shot from a hotel window near LAX. What starts as the expected LA establishing shot, slowly disintegrates as a handwritten algorithm rearranges data in the frame - a metaphor for the city's precarity and its constant processes of reinvention, self-destruction, and reorganisation.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 10/11 - Starting 15th October

A finger cannot hide the sun!, 2022, directed by May Kassem (360 mins)
PARIS
A film on the struggle of undocumented immigrants in Paris in 1996 (les Sans Papiers de Saint-Bernard) and today, social and political struggles on the ground, labour strife, the conditions of refugees and the undocumented, the city itself, its public spaces, the inclusion/exclusion of its inhabitants.
An epic 6 hour 5-part documentary unfurling the hopes and dreams of the struggle against immigration control 20 years ago and today, through the prism of memories, those of the filmmaker who was a militant involved in that struggle in 96, and her comrades who surface through archival material against the backdrop of Paris today.
A meditation on the city, with its rivers and trains portrayed as veins and blood running throughout, its inhabitants a vital part of that body, appearing in reflections on its multiple surfaces, mirrored, shadowed, anonymous and one.

DIGITAL GALLERY: SHORT FILM SERIES NO 11/11 - Starting 22nd October

New York Our Time, 2021, directed by Vivienne Dick (94 mins)
NEW YORK
This is an intimate and philosophic documentary that contrasts the concerns of present day living in New York with the bohemian wildness of the city in the late 70's, reflected through the lives of artists, musicians and friends of the filmmaker.

Dark Room, 2002, directed by Joe Lee (18 mins)
DUBLIN
An exploration of the impact of drugs on individuals and the community in the area of St Michael's Estate, Dublin City during the 1990's. Dark Room was first seen in flat 118, Block 4, St Michael's Estate, as part of the 2002 exhibition Out Of Place which combined art made by local people based around themes relating to the history of the area.

WATERGATE THEATRE

Sunday 10th August
Metropolis, 1927, directed by Fritz Lang
Short Film: and a porcelain cat, 2020, Juana Robles

Wednesday 20th August
Of Time and City, 2008, directed by Terence Davies
Short Film: Herbert Simms City, 2019, Paddy Cahill

Wednesday 27th August
Manhattan, 1979, directed by Woody Allen
Short: American Dreams No 3: Life, Liberty and Happiness, 2002, directed by Moira Tierney

Wednesday 3rd September
Gaza, 2019, directed by Gary Keane & Andrew McConnell
Short Film: Missing Green, 2013, directed by Anne Maree Barry

Wednesday 17th September
Out of Focus presents a short film programme - City Symphonies
Includes Q&A moderated by filmmaker Dean Kavanagh

Wednesday 1st October
Wings of Desire, 1987, directed by Wim Wenders
Short Film: With Wind & White Cloud, 2005, directed by Dónal Ó Céilleachair

Wednesday 8th October
Robocop, 1987, directed by Paul Verhoven
Short Film: DAY 55, 2013, directed by Donal Foreman

Wednesday 15th October
Playtime, 1967, directed by Jacques Tati
Short Film: Herbert Simms City, 2019, Paddy Cahill

Wednesday 22nd October
Adam and Paul, 2004, directed by Lenny Abrahamson
Short Film: Driving Through Dublin, 1982, directed by Andrew Manson