VWL Collective launch event takes place at The Dock

VWL Collective, a new collective of Leitrim-based filmmakers working in the realms of experimental, creative documentary and animation, launch event is set to take place on April 12 at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon. 

The collective wants to show its films to the general public and create a platform for creativity and inspiration through moving images. 

Aside from showing their films, VWL Collective plans to programme other people's work, including classics of underground cinema. The aim is to grow the art of underground and experimental film in the northwest.

There will be short introductions to each filmmaker, a sample of their work and a video installation in the foyer. Come along to this free event to meet the makers, watch some films, and treat yourself to an evening of visual and audio immersion.

Fergal Brennan is a multimedia artist, award-winning filmmaker, and educator. He specialises in drawing, documentary, and animation, for cinema and installation. 

His work merges rational and non-rational approaches: systems and indeterminacy, equally influenced by maths, music and visual art. 

For the past two years, he has been developing animation workshops for children, with the goal of creating a workbook of experimental animation exclusively for kids.

Orla McHardy is an artist living in Leitrim. Working through expanded animation, video, text, documentary and sculptural installation, her current work examines where value is placed (and not placed) on the hidden time of care, love and labour.

Ultan O'Brien is a musician and filmmaker based in Leitrim. His video work takes an interest in the relationship between movement, collage, gesture and music and has been exploring themes relating to mindsets, fantasies and metaphors engendered by human illness.

In 2022, Ultan was commissioned by CCI, Paris and CMC, Dublin to create a film and score as part of Ulysses Journey 2022. 

The film was described as: "...dazzled transcendence, an art-full, hyper-realised, liberation in which wild collisions of images and movement, nightmare symbols and musical effulgence, collage together beautifully to spin our heads in the most beautifully Joycean way." — Dr Stephen Graham.

Willie Stewart is a Dublin-born, Leitrim-based musician and filmmaker. In his films, much like his music and audio work, all is left to chance. 

The element of the now, to be recorded then later taken apart, spliced and put into an order inspired by hopes for the future, turns the past from a static memory into motion, thickening the plot.