STIX Screening Programme
October 15 – November 3rd, 2026Over a month long period and 5 screen based events, STIX Screening Programme presents works by emerging Limerick artists alongside filmmakers and contemporary artists from around the island, in partnership with our friends TEST SCREEN and AEMI. It was born from a desire to create a space for experimental moving-image and film practices in Limerick city.
In partnership with The Cinema Café – the idea was to build and keep a DIY cinema installed for future use. Housed in a building that has lived many lives; a cinema, a pool hall and a casino to name a few, this screening programme invites audiences to view experimental films that invoke memory – both the mystical & mundane.
A line-up of Limerick-based artists working with everyday media, found footage, obsolete technologies and so called lowbrow internet culture, exploring nostalgia as something less stable than memory.
Johnny McMahon, Mya Moore, Erin O’Looney, Mícheál Keating, Arwen Duggan, Nicolás Rojas Sanabria & Hazel Gardner.
Filmmaker and scholar Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz invites audiences to think together about cinematic parody, underground cinema practices and guerrilla filmmaking.
The event featuresda selection of drag parody films by The Gay Girls Riding Club (GGRC), a gay collective from 1960s Los Angeles (under the shadow of and inspired by the Hollywood sign). GGRC made low-budget parodies of at-the-time-recent Hollywood films as a way to socialise, making their underground bar culture a space for film exhibition, drag shows and…horse riding.
GGRC is followed by Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz‘s Modelling (2025) — second film by Cabbage Lane Productions — a DIY pseudo production company investigating improvisational filmmaking, role of parody in Robert Bresson and gay skulls. Made under the shadow of, and inspired by the now-inactive Pálás cinema in Galway, and in collaboration with Alina Hernández.
aemi’s 2026 touring programme ‘Desire Lines’, an annual selection of artist and experimental film that brings together a range of voices from Irish and international contemporary practice. Featuring films by Chloe Brenan, Collectif Faire Part, Eóin Heaney, Olivia Normile and Basma al-Sharif.
‘Desire Lines’ is a term from the field of landscape architecture used, as Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology (2006) to ‘describe unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow.’ Taken as a whole, the films featured in ‘Desire Lines’ offer up a picture of imposed and chosen deviation, a picture that takes in experiences of isolation and displacement alongside those of collective resistance and revelation, taking care to capture the fleeting moments where these possibilities can briefly intersect.
Initially formed in 2016 by Co-Directors Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick aemi’s core objective is to open up platforms and pathways for film artists. aemi is a resource organisation, offering a range of supports directly to artists. aemi regularly curate and screen work by film artists in a variety of capacities.
Test Screen and Starling present 'The Swallow', directed by Tadhg O'Sullivan.
An artist, isolated from the world but not from her memories, unpacks the remnants of a life long-lived and tries to make sense of her own unwillingness to let go.
Test Screen is a space to explore alternative cinema as a collective experience in Limerick City established by Graham Patterson and Laya Meabhdh Kenny in 2025.
Curated by STARLING, Soothsayers presents three enigmatic works by Colm Higgins, Eimear Walshe, Michelle Doyle & Cóilín O’Connell.
Through the retelling of age-old stories these works navigate inherited beliefs and situations, be it religious, linguistic, or quotidian. Built in humour, papier-mâché and gold leaf, the films exist as alternative worlds. We’ve chosen them as a sublime conclusion to a programme that touches on the many facets of recollection.
Colm Higgins – Saint Brendan's Dream, 2025
Eimear Walshe – Free State Pangs, 2025
Michelle Doyle & Cóilín O’Connell – Super Giardín, 2022