Sunday 1st November 2026
1:00pm
(before the International Poetry Films at 3pm & 4.30pm)
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 2nd November.
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Sunday 1st November @ 1.00pm |
Poem: Walking
Synopsis – A poem about sandhills, dog-walking, and the fragility of all things. The film weaves between dog walkers, dogs, and the bird life of Liscannor Bay, echoing lines from another of Mark Roper’s poems, ‘More’, “Let one thing lead to another. Let there be no end to looking.”
Director: Grace Wells (Ireland)
Grace Wells is an award-winning eco-poet and poetry-film maker. Nature, spirit-of-place, and our myriad ecological crises are the large themes of her writing. Grace has published three books of poetry with Dedalus Press, most recently, ‘The Church of the Love of the World’ which was shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award and the UK Laurel Prize. She is currently Writer-in-Residence for Hometree Charity’s Dinnseanchas eco-arts project, working to build community resilience within vibrant natural habitats. In August 2026, she was selected as the recipient of the inaugural PFGI poetry bursary in association with Poetry Ireland.
Poem: Rosehip Syrup
Synopsis – This poetry film is a collaboration between poet Roisin Kelly and filmmaker Sarah Corcoran, using archival footage from the Northern Ireland Screen collection.
Here is an account of Roisin’s inspiration behind the project: ‘Watching this archival footage inspired me to write a piece based on my sense of disconnection to the north of Ireland, where generations of my family lived including myself until 1994. I have previously written about this sense of loss and my longing to return to the city of Belfast, and this time I drew on my great-grandmother’s upbringing on a farm in County Down. I wanted to imbue the piece with this childlike fantasy of being able to reach out to my ancestors via the land itself by invoking the rituals and history that are common to the whole of Ireland. However there is a melancholic emotion to this attempt underlaid with an adult’s understanding that no one can ever truly connect with the past. ‘
Director: Sarah Corcoran (Ireland)
Sarah is a film director from Cork. Since 2022 she has been directing experimental shorts, music videos, fashion and poetry films. She is currently enrolled in the MA in Film and Screen Media course at UCC. Her short film Whirlybird had its debut screening at the Magikal Charm Film Festival in NYC in December 2025 where it was awarded the title ‘In The Spirit of Kenneth Anger’. Her previous experimental short ‘Unseen Guest’ was selected for screening at Triskel Christchurch cinema for 4 consecutive nights, at Lift-Off Global Film Festival, IndieCork festival and CineSalon. She was also invited by Film Ireland to discuss ‘Unseen Guest’ on their podcast. In August 2023 her short film ‘Still Life’ was featured on globally acclaimed magazine Wonderland. She immerses herself fully in the filmmaking process by taking on multiple roles – including writing, producing, directing, cinematography, editing, set design, sound design, costume design and performance.
Poem: Famine Path to Killnasoolagh
Synopsis – Skin Covered Axe is a short poetry film set on the Famine Path to Killnasoolagh in County Clare. Mary Grogan’s poem imagines the voice of a starving labourer paid pennies to build the path. As the camera follows its stones towards Killnasoolagh churchyard, his thoughts turn to hunger, the people dying around him and a dream of escape to America. The path becomes a quiet reminder of the lives and labour held all around us.
Director: Conor Madden (Ireland)
Conor Madden is a director, actor, theatre and film maker based in County Clare, Ireland. With almost twenty years’ professional experience, his work moves between live performance and film, with a particular interest in how the camera can reshape performance and create new possibilities for storytelling. His practice is collaborative, playful and socially engaged. He has developed work with actors, young people, disabled artists and adults with intellectual disabilities, creating environments in which participants can contribute meaningfully without being pressured to perform in a prescribed way. As an artist with a disability, Conor brings a strong awareness of access to his directing practice. He is interested in work that is artistically ambitious, emotionally honest and shaped with, not merely made about, the people involved.
Poem: And so it is…
Synopsis – The film is a meditation on humanity’s loss of meaning, morality, and connection to the natural world. It portrays a civilisation that has replaced spirituality with materialism and empty symbols, allowing false leaders and hollow promises to flourish. Nature is being destroyed through drought, waste, and disregard, while the image of the four horses suggests an approaching reckoning or apocalypse. The final movement turns inward: humanity is blind to the truth it is creating, hiding behind a “clandestine veil” while continuing recklessly toward destruction.
Director: Thomas O’Donoghue (Ireland)
Thomas O’Donoghue is an Irish filmmaker whose work spans short narrative films, poetic explorations, and experimental cinema. Operating primarily as a producer, writer and director, O’Donoghue creates films that probe human experience, memory, and existential themes. His works are characterised by meticulous storytelling, visual poetry, and a strong auteurial voice, often blending realism with philosophical reflection.
Poem: Bela Fisterra
Synopsis – Bela Fisterra accompanies and expands the journey of the Irish poet Paddy Bushe to Fisterra, the terminal coast where the land seems to end and start again. The poem, originally written in Gaelic, unfolds his vision of the end of the world in four languages—Galician, Gaelic, Spanish, and English—and is embodied in four distinct voices: David Clarck, the poet Yolanda Castaño, Pepe Formoso, recipient of the text, and Bushe himself, who appears at the end of the video reciting in Gaelic.
In this visual tour of the Costa da Morte, its dunes and paths form a dialogue with the words to interrogate the traveler: why come here, what horizon are you looking for, where the end of the earth really begins. With music by Carlos Núñez, this piece intertwines landscape, language and memory to turn Bela Fisterra, the end of the earth, into a starting point rather than an arrival.
Director: Juan Lesta (Ireland / Spain)
Born in A Coruña, Spain, 1971, Juan Lesta is a visual artist and audiovisual director whose recent work explores the intersection between landscape, music and perception. He also creates interventions in natural and exhibition spaces through video, immersive and light installations. Co-Director of the documentary Versograms (Verses & Frames), the first documentary dedicated to the international phenomenon of video poetry, he has directed video poems for important Galician poets such as Dores Tembrás, Antía Otero or Estíbaliz Espinosa.
As a music video director, he has created videos for artists such as Roger & Brian Eno; his projects have been exhibited at leading venues such as the Centre Pompidou Metz (Metz, France), the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF) (Paderborn, Germany), the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), the Fundación pazos Cuchillo, the Fundación Díaz Caneja and the Museo Centro Gaiás, as well as in many festivals and collections.
Poem: Dublin Dust
Synopsis – A love letter to Dublin and its inhabitants.
Director: Polina Cosgrave (Ireland)
Polina Cosgrave is the author of two poetry collections, My Name Is (Dedalus Press, 2020) and Cargo (The Gallery Press, 2024), and numerous plays and short stories. She was described as one of the most fearless and exciting voices in contemporary Irish poetry by Adam Wyeth (Poetry Review Ireland).
Her work has appeared on TV, radio and in many anthologies and magazines, including the Forward Prizes Book of Poetry, Winter Papers and The Stinging Fly. She has been a recipient of multiple Arts Council Awards.
Poem: The Singer’s House
Synopsis – “What do we say anymore to conjure the salt of our earth?”
‘Salt’ was filmed 400 meters under the surface in coastal Antrim, where machinery and poetry echo out from the depths of Ireland’s only active salt mine. Featuring and inspired by Seamus Heaney’s “The Singers House”, this short documentary takes a poetic view of the salt mine as both an artificial space and a natural environment, finding a sense of humanity in its alien sounds and structures.
Director: Conall McCauley (Northern Ireland)
Conall McCauley is an emerging Animator, Sound Artist and Filmmaker from rural Derry. He currently works for the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, where he oversees oral history projects and produces documentary material surrounding the work of Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson. His sound installations and short films have played locally and internationally in exhibitions and film festivals since 2022.
Poem: Foresters’ Blood
Synopsis – Filmed in a harvested commercial forestry site, Foresters’ Blood moves through drained ground, torn soil, exposed roots and felled trees. Against these images, the poem’s lament for Ireland’s lost woodlands becomes a meditation on extraction, memory and the thin line between forest and timber crop. The film connects older histories of woodland clearance with the present-day distinction between native woodland and plantation forestry.
Director: Philip Ryan (Ireland)
Philip Michael Ryan is a visual artist with a background in architecture based in Waterford. His practice works across moving image, installation, social art practice and site-responsive research, often examining landscape, infrastructure, ecology and the cultural systems through which places are altered, governed and remembered. He is co-founder of Nocht Studio, and his recent work has engaged with woodland ecologies, extractive land use, public participation and the traces left by economic and environmental change.
Poem: Time Piece
Synopsis – The film follows the journey of a family heirloom as it passes through multiple generations and highlights the impact it makes along the way. Based on a true story, it explores the themes of the passage of time and the interactions between an object and those that it comes into contact with. This is counterpoised by the experiences of the Irish diaspora as they journeyed to distant countries, and yet the memory of them was kept alive by the objects that they sent back to their loved ones.
Director: Chris Gibbons (Ireland)
Chris has lived in Ireland for over 35 years, and is a relative newcomer to poetry/film, having enjoyed a long career as a senior lecturer in engineering and sustainability in MTU and UCC in Cork City. His films have been shown at the Ó Bhéal poetry evenings in Cork City since 2025, and he has had a film shortlisted and screened at the 2025 Ó Bhéal International Poetry Film Festival in November 2025. Chris is also a member of the Bristol Poetry Film Club since 2026 and has shown films there. To date his poems have been mostly narrative in nature but he is also starting to explore other genres including Haiku.
Poem: to begin again the effort
Synopsis – To Begin Again is a collaborative 3-minute poetry film uniting written word, spoken performance, cinematography, and original music. The haiku sequence by Belfast poet & playwright Una Woods is voiced by Ellen Ann Schultz, filmed by Josh Schultz, and set to an original score composed by Dillon Burns (tatu.ie). Together, the team has created a layered visual and sonic interpretation that brings the poems’ imagery and emotional resonance to life.
Director: Josh Schultz (Northern Ireland)
Josh Schultz first encountered the poetry of Una Woods as co-editor of You Can’t Eat Flags for Breakfast: Poets, Politicians and the Public Reflect on the Troubles, where Una’s work stood alongside that of some of Ireland’s most celebrated poets, including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley and Medbh McGuckian. His professional relationship with Una continued through theatre. Josh worked as dramaturg with Una and her daughter Ellen on the staging of Una’s play Grace Before Meals at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre. What began as a creative collaboration would later become a deeply personal connection: Josh married Ellen in 2013, becoming part of the family.
A theatre director and producer, Josh co-founded Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis and has directed more than 20 productions across Minneapolis, Chicago, Cork and Belfast. His work spans theatre, poetry, community arts and intercultural practice. He has also edited the poetry publications The Lonely Poets Guide to Belfast and Brilliant Resilience: poetry, craft and photography from Co. Fermanagh.
Poem: Dear Ecclesiastes
Synopsis – When the world doesn’t hear, it’s time to talk to Ecclesiastes… Has something changed under the sun? What can we all, ‘living, dead and as yet unborn’, do? When poets become soldiers and write between the (front)lines … poems become prayers!
A poetry film dedicated to the memory of Maksym “Dali” Kryvtsov — a Ukrainian soldier, junior sergeant of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, poet, photographer, public figure, and volunteer, who was killed on January 7, 2024, at the age of 33 on the frontline defending Ukraine in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Hero of Ukraine (2025, posthumously). As of April 2026, the verified archive contains 289 names of literary figures who have been killed in Russia’s war on Ukraine since 2014. Among the deceased are poets, writers, translators, editors, publishers, librarians, and researchers, both military and civilian (according to the ‘Nedopysani/The Unfinished’ project).
“To my fellow-countrymen, in Ukraine and not in Ukraine, living, dead and as yet unborn my friendly epistle” from a poem by Taras Shevchenko.
Director: Andrii Humennyi (Ireland / Ukraine)
Andrii Humennyi is a Ukrainian multimedia journalist, photographer, and filmmaker based in Ireland. He has worked across Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Ireland, creating video content, photo stories, interviews, and digital media projects. His journalism background has shaped how he understands storytelling. It has taught him to look beyond events and explore the people, emotions, and personal experiences behind them. Through photography and videography, he has developed a visual approach rooted in observation, human connection, and an interest in the details of everyday life. He is drawn to stories that explore identity, freedom, forced displacement, resilience, and the complexity of the human experience.
Poem: The Art of Perception
Synopsis – The Art of Perception is a visual cinematic poem about the nature of human existence and our understanding of the world beyond physical reality.
Director: Thomas O’Donoghue (Ireland)
Thomas O’Donoghue is an Irish filmmaker whose work spans short narrative films, poetic explorations, and experimental cinema. Operating primarily as a producer, writer and director, O’Donoghue creates films that probe human experience, memory, and existential themes. His works are characterised by meticulous storytelling, visual poetry, and a strong auteurial voice, often blending realism with philosophical reflection.
(And We Said Nothing) (6:58)
Poem: First They Came For
Synopsis – When a loyal soldier refuses to join her former friend’s violent new regime, she must protect her secret life in a desperate stand off as the revolution rolls up to her front door in an army tank…
Director: Jonny Farrelly (Ireland)
Jonny is a multi award winning writer, poet and director. Specialising in ‘The Limerick’, his poems have been published and won awards internationally! For his film and TV writing endeavours, he created the series, ‘First World Problems’ and ‘Feasts, Fasts and Festivals’ for RTE and developed and produced the feature films, ‘Poster Boys’ for SKY Cinema and ‘Fr Des’ for Northern Ireland Screen. He is in post production on his new feature, ‘Prodigal Sun’ (as writer and producer) and is currently writing the TV series ‘The Art Of Magdalene’ with Wiktor Piatowski for HBO Poland.
Jonny has written, produced and directed numerous short films; ‘Agus Ni Duirt Muid Tada’, ‘Everything Looks Better In The Sunshine’, ‘Leap Of Faith’, ‘A Haiku To My Mind Via Limerick’, ‘Crane Count’, ‘What The Kids Thought About Covid’, ‘Cascarino Voices’ and ‘I Think I Hate My Son’. All have found international distribution and won international awards and accolades. ‘Leap Of Faith’ and ‘Everything Looks Better In The Sunshine’, are both currently available on Disney Plus.
Poems: Imbolc
Synopsis – Imbolc is the first day of spring in the Celtic Calendar. It is also St. Brigid’s Day in Ireland. The word itself means “in the belly” relating to the birth of lambs.
Inspired by Saint Brigid’s Well in Faughart, the poem plays with ancient rhythms and rhymes as the mystery of healing. The numbers and geometric shapes relate to the four elements that create our world: water, earth, fire and air, which together make the alchemical symbol of the philosopher’s stone – said to produce the “elixir of life”. Shot on location at Ballynoe Stone Circle and in Cove Park Scotland, the landscape plays an important role. The choreography and dance performance were directly created by listening to the recital of the poem by Lucky McIntire, a bigender dancer from the US with Irish roots. The Irish translation and recital were provided by Caitriona Lane, a bilingual Irish poet. Music was composed by Derek Ball.
Director: Csilla Toldy (Northern Ireland / Hungary)
Csilla Toldy has published three volumes of poetry with Lapwing Belfast (2013, 2015, 2018), a full collection, Firebird, with Arlen House (2025); Angel Fur and other stories with Stupor Mundi, (2019) and the novel Bed Table Door (Wrecking Ball, 2023) which won the Desmond Elliott prize. Recent poetry has appeared in Southword, Cyphers, PN Review and Abridged. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and nominated for the Forward Prize. Csilla creates film poems as a visual artist. www.csillatoldy.co.uk
Poem: Wolf Medicine
Synopsis – A meditative voyage into wolf dreaming. Eco-poet Grace Wells contemplates the loss of the Irish wolf and the healing this apex predator could bring.
Director: Grace Wells (Ireland)
Grace Wells is an award-winning eco-poet and poetry-film maker. Nature, spirit-of-place, and our myriad ecological crises are the large themes of her writing. Grace has published three books of poetry with Dedalus Press, most recently, ‘The Church of the Love of the World’ which was shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award and the UK Laurel Prize. She is currently Writer-in-Residence for Hometree Charity’s Dinnseanchas eco-arts project, working to build community resilience within vibrant natural habitats. In August 2026, she was selected as the recipient of the inaugural PFGI poetry bursary in association with Poetry Ireland.
