Desire Lines Screening and Q&A

'Desire Lines’ is aemi's 2026 touring programme, an annual selection of artist and experimental film that brings together a range of voices from Irish and international contemporary practice. 

‘Desire Lines’ premiered at the Irish Film Institute on Thursday 22nd January 2026 and features films by Chloe Brenan, Collectif Faire Part, Eóin Heaney, Olivia Normile and Basma al-Sharif. 

‘Desire Lines’ is a term from the field of landscape architecture used, as Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology (2006) to ‘describe unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow.’ 

Taken as a whole, the films featured in ‘Desire Lines’ offer up a picture of imposed and chosen deviation, a picture that takes in experiences of isolation and displacement alongside those of collective resistance and revelation, taking care to capture the fleeting moments where these possibilities can briefly intersect. 

aemi is delighted to share a newly commissioned essay, written by Leah Reynolds, to accompany our 2026 touring film programme ‘Desire Lines.’ Leah Reynolds is a writer and bookseller based in Bristol, UK.

Read artist Emma Battlebury’s reflection on ‘Desire Linesʼ, written for VAI HERE. 

FILMS

Morning Circle / Morgenkreis, Basma al-Sharif, 2025, Canada/UAE, 21 minutes
Verdigris, Chloe Brennan, 2025, Ireland 12 minutes 
as above, so below (Limits and Demonstrations), Olivia Normile, 2025, Ireland, 3 minutes
Speech For A Melting Statue, Collectif Faire Part, 2023, Belgium, Congo, Democratic Republic, 10 minutes
Body Diagrams (Limits and Demonstrations), Olivia Normile, 2025, Ireland, 1
minute
30 seconds Parish, Eóin Heaney, 2024, Ireland, 27 minutes (Eóin Heaney’s PARISH screens in ‘Desire Lines’ from a DCP generously provided by IFI Irish Film Archive)

SYNOPSES

Basma al-Sharif, Morning Circle / Morgenkreis, 2025, Canada/UAE, 21mins
A short visceral narrative film unfolds in three parts to describe loss. From our earliest experience of separation to the imperceptible violence associated with integrating to a new country when yours is no longer livable, Morgenkreis follows a father and son in their intimate rituals as they prepare to start the day and head to kindergarten.

Chloe Brenan, Verdigris, 2025, Ireland 12mins
Verdigris is a digitised Super 8mm film shot largely during a residency in Paris. Drifting through the city, it explores how architecture shapes movement and how digression can serve as subtle resistance. Through textured, meandering visuals and the layering of specific histories, the film reflects on dailiness, standardisation, time, and control – suggesting that movement in the city is never truly neutral.

Olivia Normile, Limits and Demonstrations (EVA Platform Commission), 2025, Ireland
The installation for which Olivia’s two videos were made consisted of video projection sequences, drawings, and sculptural interventions – each functioning like the parts of a deconstructed film. The work employed strategies of editing and collage to interrupt and disrupt the familiar patterns of speech and physical movement; laying bare the materiality and labour in the construction of representational narratives, whilst also fragmenting the passivity that tends to accompany our experience of film viewership and cinematic space.

Collectif Faire Part, Speech for a Melting Statue, 2023, Belgium, Congo, Democratic Republic, 10mins
In June 2020, thousands of people took to the streets in Brussels to make a fist against police brutality and institutional racism in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. For a moment, it seemed that some demonstrators would take down the statue of colonial king Leopold II in a nearby square. For now the sculpture is still standing, but an optimistic poet already prepares her speech for the day it will be removed. Archival images of colonial monuments that arrive in a museum in Kinshasa, RDC are paired with a ceremonial text by poet Marie Paule Mugeni. The voice-over presents the official removal of a Brussel’s colonial statue as if scheduled for the very next day. However, in opposition to Kinshasa, there are no concrete plans for the statues’ takedown up to now.

Eóin Heaney, Parish, 2024, Ireland, 27mins
PARISH is a hybrid documentary that examines the representation of community identity. The film follows a communal choreography; a cinematic moveable feast where a diverse group of people add colour, nuance and shape to their community identity through the vivid, visceral nature of memory and its connection to dramatic experience. Shot on 16mm film in the Dublin suburb where I grew up and inspired by the ritual of Beating The Bounds, PARISH is a film work that utilizes documentary, fiction, biography, myth, and memoir.