VIEWfinders to put North Clare in focus

A FILM screening in the country’s best-known caves is one of the highlights of a new film festival taking place in North Clare later this month.
Burren College of Art alumnus Róisín McGuigan is behind the VIEWfinders Film Festival, which focuses on films exploring the visual arts.
“Most of the films are screening on campus. The other one will be screened in the Aillwee Cave. I went to them because the film, Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog, is about a cave in the south of France, the Chauvet cave discovered in 1994, which holds the oldest known cave art in the world. It predates anything that has ever been seen before and it was pristine and completely intact and it touches on a lot of different subjects including archaeology, geology, anthropology and art. The different subjects give it a broader appeal than just visual art. It is a really good fit for the Aillwee Cave. Although they don’t have artwork,” Róisín told The Clare Champion.
Róisín studied visual art in the National College of Art and Design before working for arts organisations including the Kerry Film Festival, something which allowed her to gain the experience and confidence to start VIEWfinders.
“After I graduated from the Burren College of Art, I returned to work in the Kerry Film Festival but then I realised that this was not the direction I wanted to go and that I want to make my own work. I set out on my own and began doing my own work. As part of my work with the festival, I had travelled the world seeing great films and great visual arts films. I would come home and say to friends ‘you have to see this film, it is really wonderful’ and no one would have seen them and there weren’t being shown anywhere. That spawned the idea that maybe I should do a festival so people could see these visual arts films because there were so many of them around. Then I thought, ‘where will I do this?’ I didn’t want to start it in Kerry. There are already two festivals there so it didn’t seem like the right place. I always wanted to do something with the Burren somewhere along the line. I realised that that was the best location. The Burren College of Art has such a beautiful setting that it seemed the right dynamic for this festival between the landscape, the village and the venue itself,” she explained.
“I came up with the idea just under a year ago after travelling back from the Cannes Film Festival in May. I saw a number of documentaries there and it was at that moment the lightbulb went on. Although there were a lot of festivals, you could still only see one or two of these films so there were no festivals pulling these visual arts films together,” she added.
Of course, putting on a film festival would have been much more difficult if Róisín didn’t already have some ideas on possible screenings.
“I had a list of my favourites that I had seen over the past few years that people here were just not getting to see. I had looked at what other festivals there were in the rest of the world and what they might be screening. The point was to bring new films and films that were not getting shown at other festivals in Ireland. So I spoke to Mary Hawkes Green in the Burren College of Art and since I was a former student, they were more than happy to work with me on this, knowing it would be of benefit to the college and the area in the long term,” Róisín outlined.
As well as broad interest visual arts films, Róisín was also keen to include documentaries and films with specific Clare interest. One of these is Tim Robinson: Connemara directed by Pat Collins.
“The Burren map drawn by Tim Robinson was hugely useful to me when I lived in North Clare. I just loved it. Tim Robinson has drawn maps on Connemara and the Aran Islands too. As part of the Jameson Film Festival last year, I saw a documentary about him and his map making. It focuses more on Connemara but for a local audience who would appreciate him and his maps I think it will be a good film for County Clare,” she explained.
“I am hoping people will come from all over Ireland to this. Up to today, it has just been conversations with people but the feedback has been very positive. I am hoping that because it is a weekend and it is the Burren that people will look at it and just go ‘what better time to come?’,” Róisín concluded.
VIEWfinders Film Festival runs from Friday, March 30 to Sunday, April 1.