Fanvid: The former hair salon in Dublin now hosting boundary-busting film nights

About once a month a small but growing group of people gather at Unit 44, in Stoneybatter in Dublin, for another edition of Fanvid. The monthly DIY film night, which screens new experimental work, has been on something of a roll since its inception, in the spring of 2022.

The audience is made up of the makers of the films being screened – a request the curators make in the open-call process – and of those interested in avant-garde and experimental moving image. Some films are just a few seconds long, some a few minutes; others can run to 10 or 20 minutes. Audiences sit on fold-out chairs and watch the eclectic mix of shorts and microshorts over the course of an hour or so. What has emerged is a buzzing community of artists, some of whom are now making work specifically for Fanvid.

Unit 44 is a DIY space run by the experimental music collective Kirkos. The former hair salon has become something of a beacon for experimental performance in the capital. Besides Fanvid, recent events there have included a tin whistle “slow music event”, a “silent concert experience” collaboration with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf, a multimedia performance with the American novelist Tom Comitta and the Irish composer Sebastian Adams, and concerts by the Scandinavian instrumentalists Miman and the Bhutanese guitarist Tashi Dorji.

What became Fanvid began with the artists Frank Sweeney, Anthony O’Connor and Michelle Doyle screening a film they had made and, according to Sweeney, “thinking of an informal space and a space where we could consider things that aren’t usually considered film or cinema”. The early editions of the film club evening were hosted by the artist-run organisation Dublin Modular. “In general, the main thing was trying to consider the idea that everyone is walking around with cameras in their pockets, and ‘film’ can be something you shot from the bus window that day and want to show that evening,” Sweeney says.

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Attendance grew slowly, Sweeney says, “and then all of a sudden it became packed”. Film-makers are often watching their work with an audience for the first time, and connections are created between their fellow artists, sometimes leading to further collaboration.

A Fanvid highlight last year was a screening of Motivational Propaganda, the artist Niall Cullen’s compelling film about the frustrations that emerge from, and the resilience required throughout, the creative process. Another highlight was Winesploitation, a “borderline trash meets docufiction” film by Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz and Alina Hernández. Gürbüz went on to curate a Fanvid evening of DIY films from Turkey and Syria last May, raising funds for earthquake-relief organisations. A more recent highlight was Caoilfhionn Hanton’s madcap, brilliant 3 Pork Chops.

“People leave inspired,” says Alice Quinn Banville, who is both a curator involved in the production of Fanvid events and Unit 44′s event producer. She’s not wrong. After attending a few events, I drummed up the courage to submit a video poem that I made in collaboration with the artist Dorje de Burgh. Other artists who have been involved in organising the night include Deabhan Murray, Ellis Weiner and Rachel E Murphy, who also made the latest Fanvid poster. Artists who have curated screenings include Aisling Phelan, Tara Carroll, Megan Conery and Cóilín O’Connell.

This large, rolling collective effort means the event is now “really solid and quite sustainable”, according to Quinn Banville. That DIY ethos is the main thing, she says. “This is a really great example of how community can work, and the success you can have doing something at a DIY level ... It’s a great way for illustrators, animators, graphic designers, visual artists, sound artists, performance artists – people who may not be specifically working with just film – to test out ideas. You get to see a body of work at a Fanvid event from a really wide variety of artists with different approaches. And just because you’re making work in Ireland doesn’t mean you’re from Ireland. It’s really very varied.”

The mind-bending variety of any Fanvid night is down, Quinn Banville says, to the “different approaches people take. We don’t have any rules on length or format. It could be something you made on your phone, it could be a film you made with proper cameras, it could be a music video, stop motion, or made with different animation techniques. Sometimes festivals have certain categories in mind – documentary, animated shorts – so there’s not much opportunity to see a real big mishmash of all those things.” Quinn Banville is also keen to highlight the work of Aemi, an initiative founded by Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick, supporting and exhibiting moving-image works by artists and experimental film-makers.

The set-up at Unit 44 – which has a decent sound system and a high-quality projector – adds to Fanvid’s coherence, with the DIY ethos resulting in an execution that is both simple and sophisticated. “I don’t love to use the term ‘low stakes’,” Quinn Banville says, “because the work is important to everyone involved. But for people starting to make films and experimental moving image, it’s a very accessible way to get into that. It’s a simple open-call process, and there’s no cost involved.” The creative fuel the event is generating is a fascinating outcome of collective curation that also demonstrates how vital Unit 44 has become.

In the long run, Sweeney would like to see a publicly funded alternative-cinema space in Dublin. He points to Close-Up Film Centre, in London, as a good example of a small art house cinema, film library and gathering space.

The next Fanvid is at Unit 44, Dublin 7, on Tuesday January 30th, at 7pm; admission is free