Once, Myrid Carten’s alcoholic mother Nuala disappears for two weeks. The daughter recognises her, curled-up in the middle of the Belfast pedestrian zone, by her shoes: the only street-drinker in high heels. She does not know what to do, keeps the camera rolling for a few minutes and leaves. How do you behave towards a mother who needs mothering herself? Carten tackles the question by making a film about it – as an intervention, exorcism, declaration of love, manifest of powerlessness.
Nuala is the centre of a complex, fragile family dynamic that revolves around the run-down family home where the camera obsessively crawls upside down along the walls again and again. The material is haunted in myriad other ways: scattered traces of past art projects, nerve-racking phone recordings and faded television images stand next to childhood memories on MiniDV cassettes that diffuse almost seamlessly into the present. At one point the mother’s voice even seems to take complete control of her daughter. Carten’s creative exuberance is enormously compelling, kept together by a fluid montage that lays bare the deeply sincere emotional core of the film.

How come the moon is able to pour such equally familiar and mysterious light on the earth it shines on? And why have the countless lunar addicts among international filmmakers been so willingly seduced by this magic power that they set important scenes of their works in the somnambulistic mood between a deeply decadent blood moon and the fresh innocence of the new moon? “To the Moon” is an entrancing ode to one of cinema’s central motifs.

Director Tadhg O’Sullivan, too, surrendered like a hypnotized man to the strange light of the moon and its cinematic supercharge. Using 130 sequences from international film history and enchanting 16mm footage shot exclusively for this project he weaves an immersive meta-narrative in which precisely placed film dialogues, literary “moon passages” and an ingeniously eclectic soundtrack also do their part. Is this where you find your own moon films, with which you were hopelessly struck at a time? Did Tadhg O’Sullivan give due space to “Black Moon” (no), “Suspiria” (no) or “Carnival of Souls” (yes)? Many may ask this. But profound consolation awaits the disappointed ones: Every missing film is outweighed by three others that are so amazing that the loss is easily got over with.

Celtic cult sites communicate effectively with the cosmos, the terrestrial darkness is churned by energy fields and sunrays. Even in one of his earliest works – a video clip for breakcore pioneer Venetian Snares – David OReilly dissects the myth of a homogenous CGI world, revealing the abrasions of a vulnerable digital DNA.

An elderly lady indulges in her audiophile obsession. She records the sound of her house during her absence to listen to it later. A life of random and environmental sound, collected on countless C60 cassettes. This poetic collage of negative film, photos, dried flowers, animation and sounds reveals a big heart for Eva Hipsey – and for quirky amateur recordings.