This one-day symposium includes speakers from across Ireland and keynote address by Professor Barton.
Date: Tuesday 09 December 2025
Time: 09.15 - 17.00
Location: Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin.
Admission is free. Please click here to go to register for a ticket on the Eventbrite webpage.
PROGRAMME
9.15 - 9.30: Welcome - Dr Justin MacGregor (Head of School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin)
9.30 - 10.45: Panel 1
Chaired by Dr Sven Anderson (Trinity College Dublin)
- Dr Denis Condon (Maynooth University) - The Big Bang: The Origins of Irish Cinema at Kynoch Munitions Works, Arklow. Did cinema begin in Arklow, Co. Wicklow? Perhaps not, but film shows at Kynoch Munitions Works in 1898 provide not only a useful starting point for the historiography of early Irish cinema but also a metaphor for cinema’s inception as a whole.
- Dr Ciara Chambers (University College Cork) - Outsider Cinema: Northern Ireland's Alternative Filmmakers. Northern Ireland has a rich heritage of amateur and independent cinema that includes several prolific filmmakers and collectives. This paper will explore the work of these image makers, many of whom garnered prestigious awards on the international independent film circuit and had their work shown in film festivals and on television.
- Dr Stephen Boyd (Institute of Art, Design and Technology) - Creative Leisure, Creating Labour: The Varied Economies of Short Irish Surf Films. This paper will provide an overview of the emergence of short Irish surf films known as ‘edits’. These short films existed on DVD, but online video hosting has allowed them to proliferate to an extent that they are now regularly screened at dedicated Irish surf film festivals. The paper will describe the varied economies of three films and will show how this creative form of leisure has created genre specific forms of labour.
- Dr Maria O’Brien (University of Galway) - The role of the producer in Irish cinema: a focus on Element Pictures. “[P]roducers … are engaged in making films that in various ways challenge and augment the images and narratives of Ireland” (Barton 2004: 11). There is little research on the producer, despite its key role in the audiovisual ecosystem. This research looks at Element Pictures, the Irish based, globally influential (Normal People, The Favourite) film/TV production company.
10.45 - 11.00: TEA/COFFEE
11.00 - 12.00: Panel 2
Chaired by Dr Stefanie Van de Peer (Trinity College Dublin)
- Dr Díóg O’Connell (Institute of Art, Design and Technology) - The Female Gaze: Irish Female Cinematographers. This paper looks at cinematography in the Irish film industry, and the role women play, focusing on key individuals (Eleanor Bowman, Suzie Lavelle, Kate McCullough, Carol Tormey). Through a survey of their work, this paper outlines and scrutinizes some of the key themes and issues aestheticized in these films.
- Dr Sarah Arnold (Maynooth University) - Women’s amateur film historiography in Ireland: amateur animation as global film. This paper examines the work - especially the animation - of Cork-based amateur filmmaker Flora Kerrigan whose 1960s short films were circulated, and gained recognition, nationally and internationally. Comparing the relative attention to her films then with her absence from film historiographies today, this paper questions the causes and consequences of this historical omission.
- Dr Susan Liddy (Mary Immaculate College) - Reflections on 5050x2020 and Beyond. It is nearly 10 years since the CEO of the Swedish Film Institute, Anna Serner, presented the 50/50 by 2020 initiative at the Cannes Film Festival. A movement spread across the world inspiring film festivals, filmmakers and film funders to embed the changes necessary to achieve gender equality in a male dominated industry. This paper will reflect on how far the Irish industry has travelled assessing what has been achieved and what remains to be done.
12.00 - 1.30: LUNCH BREAK
1.30 - 2.30: Panel 3
Chaired by Dr Aaron Hunter (Trinity College Dublin)
- Dr Abigail Keating (University College Cork) - National Horrors, Remediation, and Aislinn Clarke’s Fréwaka (2024). This paper explores representations of national and intergenerational traumas via female subjectivities, with specific reference to Aislinn Clarke’s second feature film Fréwaka (2024). While Clarke’s “found footage” debut feature The Devil’s Doorway (2018) offers itself as a literal remediation and is inherently concerned with historically un-archived events, Fréwaka is far more complex. Here, official histories and the familial archive are entangled with oral traditions/folklore, and allegory serves as a powerful tool through which Clarke remediates and reveals the patriarchal abject.
- Dr Conor O’Kelly (Trinity College Dublin) - Contemporary Irish Masculinity on Screen. This paper explores contemporary representations of masculinity in recent Irish cinema, focusing on how shifting social, cultural, and political landscapes have influenced the portrayal of male identity on screen. The paper examines how Irish filmmakers engage with themes of emotional repression, rural isolation, violence, and the legacy of patriarchy. The paper argues that these films both reflect and critique traditional models of Irish masculinity, presenting male characters who struggle with vulnerability, moral conflict, and the expectations of stoicism. The paper contends that recent Irish cinema contributes to a reimagining of male subjectivity, offering more nuanced, conflicted, and humanized portrayals of men in contemporary Ireland.
- Dr Tony Tracy (University of Galway) - Title: To be confirmed
2.30 - 2.45: TEA/COFFEE
2.45 - 4.00: Panel 4
Chaired by Dr Jennifer O’Meara (Trinity College Dublin)
- Dr Roderick Flynn (Dublin City University) - Title: To be confirmed
- Dr Anthony P. McIntyre (University College Dublin) - Tracing the Child Performer through Irish Cinema. Films such as An Cailín Ciúin (2022) and ’71 (2014) have highlighted the impact child performers have made in recent Irish film. This paper will trace the longer cinematic tradition of such child performers, examining the classed and gendered nature of such screen performances, and the key ways in which these younger artists have been deployed in service of a national cinema.
- Dr Seán Crosson (University of Galway) - Articulating vulnerability through haptic visuality: An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) (2022). Understanding the reasons for the extraordinary commercial and critical success of An Cailín Ciúin (2022) is a complex undertaking that involves considerations at a number of levels. This would include (to name but a few) the production context that made the film’s creation possible in the first instance; the marketing and distribution context that enabled it to reach a larger national and international audience than previous Irish language productions have achieved; and the particularities of its linguistic and aesthetic realisation that contributed to its impact on audiences. This paper is particularly interested in this final aspect and will examine how the film realises and communicates evocatively to the viewer the trope of vulnerability through the realisation of “haptic visuality” within the film text.
- Dr Conn Holohan (University of Galway) - Small Things Like These: Cultural Specificity and Contemporary Irish Cinema. Writing in 2004, Ruth Barton remarked upon Irish cinema’s culturally specific desire not to be culturally specific. This paper considers Irish cinematic specificity two decades on through the example of three period films, which present a culturally recognisable mode of being and belonging within the intimate space of the kitchen.
4.15 - 5.00: KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Professor Ruth Barton, ‘Irish Cinema Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century’. This paper considers the evolution of Irish film scholarship in the twenty-first century, celebrating its diversity of content and range of intellectual enquiry.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ruth Barton recently retired as Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She has published widely on Irish cinema and her works include Irish National Cinema (2004) and Acting Irish in Hollywood (2006). She has also written critical biographies of the Hollywood star, Hedy Lamarr: Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in Film (2010) and the Irish silent era director, Rex Ingram: Rex Ingram, Visionary Director of the Silent Screen (2014). Her latest monograph, Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2019 by Manchester University Press. She is currently writing a critical biography of Maureen O’Sullivan.
This symposium is generously supported by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund, and the School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin.
For further information on this event please email Karen Edmonds at karen.edmonds@tcd.ie