Sunday 2nd November 2025
1:00pm
(before the Internarional Poetry Films at 3pm & 4.30pm)
We are delighted to present these 15 Irish poetry-films in Ó Bhéal’s 13th Poetry-Film competition screenings, at the Cork Arts Theatre, Carroll’s Quay, Cork. The shortlists will also be streamed online on Monday 3rd November, simulcast via our Vimeo and YouTube channels @ 6.00pm (Irish Shortlist), 7.30pm and 9.00pm (International Shortlists). Times are in Irish Standard Time.
These poetry-films were chosen from 176 submissions made by 140 filmmakers in 41 countries.
Judges Colm Scully & Paul Casey, will select one International winner to receive the Ó Bhéal International award for best poetry-film, designed by glass artist Michael Ray, plus a cash prize of 500 euros. The best Irish Poetry Film will win a cash prize of 250 euros. Winners will be announced directly after the shortlist screenings at the Cork Arts Theatre, and online on Monday 3rd November.
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Sunday 2nd November @ 1.00pm |
Poem: It’s as if my tongue is broken
Synopsis – Probably Sappho’s single best-known poem, even if not as far as we know entirely complete, Poem 31 enacts a seeming rivalry between the speaker (maybe Sappho herself) and another, mysterious person who is the object of the beloved’s attention. It’s a poem of great feeling, an intense cry from the heart, the foundation poem of our whole lyric tradition.
Director: Peter Sirr (Ireland)
Peter Sirr lives in Dublin. The Gallery Press has published eleven poetry collections since Marginal Zones (1984), most recently The Swerve (2023) and The Gravity Wave (2019) which was a Poetry Society Recommendation and winner of the 2020 Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. He has written plays for radio, a children’s book and criticism. He teaches literary translation in Trinity College and has led many workshops and mentoring sessions. He is a member of Aosdána. He has recently begun experimenting with video poems.
Poem: Occupied By The Devil
Synopsis – A haunting, cut-out animation bringing to life Hend Jouda’s powerful poem about surviving occupation, grief, and loss in Gaza. Created for WANDER, a project produced by Bairbre Flood and supported by the Arts Council, the film turns words into stark, dreamlike visuals that bear witness to life in times of war.
Director: Silvio Severino
Silvio Severino is a Brazilian-born, Ireland-based multimedia artist and filmmaker working across collage, photography, animation, and illustration. His practice blends analogue and digital techniques, often exploring themes of identity, consumerism, and contemporary culture through a Dadaist lens. His film work spans both documentary and experimental projects, including co-directing the documentary ‘The Peculiar Saga of Gubu Man’ (official selection at IndieCork) and the experimental short MEAT, which screened as part of the Free Radicals Experimental Film Selection at the Cork International Film Festival.
Poem: The Degeneration Paradigm
Synopsis – Lonely and isolated in a directionless relationship, Marie grapples with a loss of self identity and a growing internal repression, as she explores unfamiliar environments and tries to piece together the remains of her fragile self-worth.
Director: Ciara Foran
Ciara Foran is a filmmaker and photographer from Killarney. A graduate of Film and Screen Media from UCC, she is currently pursuing a Higher Diploma in TV & Media Production through the medium of the Irish language. Tá ocras an teanga uirthi. As the official photographer for Litreacha, a queer open mic poetry night in Cork City, Ciara blends her passion for visual storytelling with her love of poetry and community. Her films have been showcased at the Fastnet Film Festival, and her diverse body of work spans short fiction, documentaries, music videos, and corporate projects. You can explore her portfolio at www.ciaraforan.com
Poem: Water and Blood
Synopsis – “Water and Blood” – is the monologue of Molly Gallagher, an 18-year-old girl, whose mother is Hungarian and whose father is Irish. She has been swimming since she was a baby and her dream is to become an Olympic swimmer and to represent Ireland. Molly’s element is water, but her Hungarian mother was a swimmer, too. So, her Hungarian blood drives her to achieve a gold for Ireland. “First, for nine months I was floating inside. When outside, my mother sang: Swim my wee one, swim, in her native Hungarian.”
Director: Csilla Toldy
Csilla Toldy is a writer/poet and digital artist from Hungary, living in Northern Ireland. The most recent among her five poetry publications are Angel Fur and Other Stories (Stupor Mundi, 2019) and Firebird (2025, Arlen House). Csilla creates film poems as a digital artist with major commissions from the Executive Office of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and CFCP. Her multi-lingual film poems have been screened internationally, and won Best Street Art Film at Berlin Underground Film Festival 2020, Audience Prize at the Experimental Film Festival Barcelona, 2021, Best Environmental film at the Toronto Women International Film Festival 2021, and European Film Union Best Cinematography Award 2024.
Poem: The Cairn of Cork
Synopsis – The poetry/film explores our cultural legacy on the environment by tracing the history of an old traveller halting site in Cork City. It also questions our celebration of our remoulding of the landscape and considers how future civilisations will interpret the Anthropocene epoch.
Director: Chris Gibbons
Chris is a newcomer to poetry/film, having enjoyed a 35 year career as a senior lecturer in engineering and sustainability in MTU and UCC in Cork City. He enjoys exploring a range of visual and spoken media including, Super 8, slow camera photography, along with digital image, video, and audio. As an engineer he enjoys the process of creation, and has found poetry film to provide great scope for storytelling and interpreting a moment in time and space.
Poem: Tamaulipas Amergin
Synopsis – ‘Amergin’ transposes the mythological first poet of Ireland to the semi-desert settings of northeastern Mexico. Loosely inspired by the fascinating story of Irish soldiers in 19th Mexico, Amergin weaves together lyrics, images, flora and fauna of the poet’s two countries (Ireland and Mexico) to create a hallucinogenic sense of estrangement and cross-pollination.
Directors: Jonathan Brennan & Dylan Brennan
Jonathan Brennan is a multi-disciplinary artist working in printmaking, painting, photography, text, moving image & sound. His work is about place: architectural and urban places as well as what is traditionally referred to as landscape, and how both interact. Jonathan has exhibited in the Ulster Museum, Golden Thread Gallery, Framewerk, Belfast Exposed, Fenderesky, The Crescent, Engage Art Studios Salthill, Dean Arts Studio Dublin, among other places. His work is in public collections in the UK and private collections worldwide.
Dylan Brennan writes poetry and prose, and divides his time between Mexico and Ireland. He is a recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and the Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill Poetry Exchange. His work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Galician and Greek. In 2022 he co-produced, in collaboration with Jonathan Brennan, the award-winning poetry film ‘Four Attempts at Making a Human’. His most recent book, Let the Dead (Banshee Press, 2023), was longlisted for the Laurel Prize.
Poem: What will happen when we die
Synopsis – This film explores the subject of death by using the metaphor of a train departing the station.
Director: Donal O’Dea
Donal O’Dea has been making Short Films for Remarkable Films for the last five years. Recent titles include ‘Skinny Dip’ ‘Call of Nature, and ‘Taxi’ and is currently in development on a historical fiction set during the famine called ‘The Silence’. He’s co-produced a number Irish cultural humour books called the ‘Feckin’ Series’ and has written numerous advertising campaigns for Carlsberg, Volkswagen and Bulmers.
Poem: Envelope
Synopsis – The exchange of handwritten letters between characters, with one writer seeking connection at home and another searching for their own place to call home.
Director: Kayvon Darabi-Fard
Kayvon Darabi-Fard has over 10 years experience working in the animation industry with a strong focus in story for animation, video games and projects of all kinds. He has worked with The Walt Disney Company, Cartoon Saloon, Jam Media, Elk Studios, Blackstaff Games, Daily Madness, Sixteen South and many more. Kayvon was collectively nominated as a member of the Story team aboard the Cartoon Saloon / Netflix co-production ‘My Father’s Dragon’ for ‘Best Storyboarding’, which won at the Irish Animation Awards 2023.
Poem: Letter To Ms Weaver
Synopsis – Letter to Miss Weaver is based on a period in Lucia Joyce’s life (daughter of James Joyce) where she is incarcerated in St Andrew’s Psychiatric Hospital, Northampton (UK). She was there as a patient and here she writes to Miss Harriet Weaver (her guardian) asking her to bring her to Ireland. It is a creative account as all documents about Lucia Joyce were destroyed.
Director: Ger Duffy
Ger Duffy lives in Co Waterford. She has written poetry, drama and screenwriting. She holds a PGDip in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths College and an MA in Screenwriting. She was winner of the Second Wave Playwriting Award, the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Award and the Redline Poetry Award. Her fiction and poetry are widely published.
Poem: Bewitching at Pooleen Woods
Synopsis – A meditation on existence pairing introspective poetry with nature cinematography, Bewitching at Pooleen Woods explores themes of entropy, the cycles of the natural world, and cosmic time. Through the lens of footage taken at the water’s edge at Pooleen Woods in West Cork, we are invited to contemplate the quiet rhythms of decay and rebirth, and our place within a universe defined by entropy’s unrelenting transformative nature.
Director: Ruth Hogger
Ruth Hogger grew up in Cork, where she studied Fine Art with specializations in Multimedia and Photography, before training as an Art Therapist. After moving to Wales in 2019, she rediscovered her passion for writing, winning numerous competitions for her poetry and short fiction. In 2024, Ruth embraced a new, nomadic lifestyle by moving into her van. In the summer of 2025, her journey led her back to Ireland. Bewitching at Pooleen Woods is born of this journey of rediscovery, and inspired by the captivating magic and beauty of West Cork.
Poem: Some say
Synopsis – This is a version of Sappho’s famous ‘Anactoria’ poem, a love poem framed between images of war and seeking to establish a place for passion that refuses to be swamped by war and warmakers. It felt particularly relevant in today’s world, but it’s a poem that has remained as fresh as when it was first composed on the island of Lesbos in the sixth century BC. I wanted the words and images to reflect both the ancient world that gave rise to it and our own broken reality.
Director: Peter Sirr (Ireland)
Peter Sirr lives in Dublin. The Gallery Press has published eleven poetry collections since Marginal Zones (1984), most recently The Swerve (2023) and The Gravity Wave (2019) which was a Poetry Society Recommendation and winner of the 2020 Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. He has written plays for radio, a children’s book and criticism. He teaches literary translation in Trinity College and has led many workshops and mentoring sessions. He is a member of Aosdána. He has recently begun experimenting with video poems.
Poem: The Green Man
Synopsis – The Greenman, usually found in architecture near windows or doors, is a mysterious figure covered in leaves and foliage. Here, the narrator lives between his technician job and otherworldly wilderness. Can he keep this up? What does the Greenman think?
Director: Phil Spillane
Phil Spillane is a writer, poet, and filmmaker from Cork, he has an MA in Creative Writing and is currently a board member of the poetry organisation; Ó Bhéal go Béal. His poetry films have been featured at STanzas Festival in St Andrews, Scotland, Cork Picture House in Cork, and his latest one, ‘The Green Man’, was at the Drumshando Poetry Film Competition in Leitrim.
Poem: The Andes call him from the couch
Synopsis – The Andes call him from the couch is based on one of a hundred prose poems with a third person narrative written by Donal Conaty as part of a collection/epic poem called Splintered. The overall work is composed of the disjointed thoughts of a bewildered man and ‘The Andes’ represents one of those thought processes. The protagonist is “sprawled on the couch” wondering if has been his right self in this life, if he “chose” badly and if it’s too late to choose another. He speculates that he could be an Andean condor or a swift though he suspects his alternative self might be somewhat less glamorous.
Directors: Donal Conaty & Eva Martin
Donal Conaty is a prose poet and filmmaker based in Sligo. His work has been published in The Cormorant and Force 10 and 16 of his poems were displayed as a visual installation in the Yeats Building in Sligo in 2019. Donal was Writer in Residence 2021/22 at The Dock Arts Centre. He is a co-founder of multi-arts production company Dry Socket, which has staged two full productions. Donal has been awarded a Creative Heartland Poetry into Film bursary and two Arts Council Agility Awards.
Eva Martin is a filmmaker, illustrator, and graphic designer from Sligo who is currently based in London. Her work focuses on evoking emotion through illustration, and analog animation. Eva’s work has been shown in the Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, The Dock Arts Centre, The Model Niland Gallery, Culture Night, and the Adaptations Film Festival. In 2023, she was awarded the Creative Heartlands Poetry into Film bursary.
Poems: Red Rose & White Coffin & I Remember
Synopsis – “Grief doesn’t stop. Grief goes with you to your grave.” After 19 years of burying the dead — from babies to the elderly, from the poor to the well-off — Cork gravedigger Stephen O’Connor shares his final farewell before retirement. Through poetry, memory, and raw emotion, The Poet of the Graves reflects on loss, love, and new beginnings.
Director: Baiba Berzina
“I never really thought of myself as a director, the word feels so big, it honestly scares me a little. The Poet of the Graves is my very first documentary, and somehow everything just fell into place. There wasn’t much prep, just me, Stephen, and my camera — two beautiful graveyards and Stephen’s kitchen for a short interview, filmed over about four to five hours in total, including set-ups.”
Poem: Learning to Breathe
Synopsis – Learning to Breathe is a poetry film made in the West of Ireland about the struggle to stay intact in a world of incomprehensible destruction. The focus is on the decimation of the author’s local environment while she is distraught over the horrors unfolding for her friend’s family in Palestine. How do we put one foot in front of the other?
Directors: Jessamine O’Connor & Marek Petrovic
Jessamine O’Connor lives on the Sligo Roscommon border in Ireland. Her poetry books are with Salmon Poetry, Nine Pens press, and the Black Light Engine Room press. Her debut novel is forthcoming with Lilliput press. She is an editor with Drunk Muse press.
Marek Petrovic is originally from Slovakia. Living in Co.Roscommon since 2016. Visual artist focusing on deeper concepts. Focuses on video, film very often in collaboration with various artists.
