ANIMAL KINGDOM (IRISH FOCUS) Director: Dean Kavanagh 120 mins, Ireland, 2017, Digital Book cinema tickets This film screened 25th April 2018. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Dean Kavanagh, hosted by aemi’s Daniel Fitzpatrick. Experimental filmmaker Dean Kavanagh’s latest work is a genre-defying exploration of the cinematic apparatus. The film concerns a character (played with corporeal intensity by Cillian Roche) who happens upon a group undergoing bestial metamorphosis. Narrative is not at the forefront of what is essentially a sensory onslaught, a complex and thrilling film that is sonically and visually stunning with disturbing performances from Roche, Anja Mahler and John Curran. A film that demands to be seen in a cinema environment , critic Fergus Daly describes it as “a film-animal, repetitively clawing out its singular territorial space. ” An exciting addition to the catalogue of underground films made by Kavanagh and colleagues over the last decade heralding a new direction in Irish cinema. Notes by Sunniva O’Flynn Director: Dean Kavanagh 120 mins, Ireland, 2017, Digital