Round 31: CineSalon
​Hosted by: Benjamin Rupprecht
March 29th 2026
CineSalon is both an annual film festival a year-round event series based in Cork. It celebrates personal, poetic and formally experimental filmmaking from across the world, providing a platform for film artists to share and discuss their work with adventurous audiences in a relaxed atmosphere. Curated by filmmakers Maximilian Le Cain and Shells Kamiel Le Cain, this defiantly independent festival exists to showcase the wild reeds of visionary film that ignore accepted cinematic paradigms and are all the more inspiring for it.​
Maximilian Le Cain
Maximilian has created a prolific and acclaimed body of moving image work including features, shorts, installations and film-related performances. His filmmaking proposes a personal relationship with cinema as a site of haunting. Accepted visual and storytelling codes are encouraged to collapse into a more personalised system that approaches moving imagery as an experiential construct open to possession by multiple claims of memory and interpretation.
Le Cain has recently completed Now & Forever, a feature film collaboration with Shells Le Cain due for release in 2026. His previous feature Solitaire premiered at Cork International Film Festival in 2023. Other recent works include Daughter of the Sun (2021), a short based on the Irish legend of the Cailleach Beara, and Blissed (2022), an erotic feature film heralded for pushing the envelope of Irish cinema. His film adaptation of composer Jennifer Walshe’s Dordán, commissioned by The Quiet Music Ensemble, was released in 2024.
In Spring 2026 Le Cain will begin production on a new feature, The Clarnwall Castaways, made with the support of an Arts Council Project award.
​Le Cain has been closely associated with the influential Experimental Film Society (EFS), an autonomous entity for producing cinema through experimentation. He is also known for his collaborations with Vicky Langan which created an intimate but unsettling personal universe in film and performance across more than a decade. Inside (2017), their Arts Council funded feature film, was exhibited at, among others, TULCA and VISUAL, Carlow, and was acquired for the Arts Council Collection in 2020. Le Cain was the 2023 Arts Council / UCC (University College Cork) Film Artist in Residence.
Le Cain is also a film programmer specialising in experimental cinema. He is co-founder and curator of CineSalon, a Cork-based experimental film event, and co-director of The CineSalon Experimental Film Festival.
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Shells Kamiel Le Cain
Shells is an artist filmmaker based in Cobh, Co.Cork.
Her dark, wryly humorous films invite viewers into an intense personal vision that is as unsettling as it is visually enticing. They unfold like shamanic trances conjuring visions that dissolve memory, dream and reality into a lyrical, often psychedelic phantasmagoria. For all their kaleidoscopic beauty, they are imbued with a deep fragility and shot through with a haunting current of melancholy.
Her most recent films are Amusements (2025) and Stammerwort (2026), a collaboration with singer/composer Claudia Barton. She is collaborating with Maximilian Le Cain on Now & Forever, a feature film that will be released in 2026.
With the support of an Arts Council Agility Award, she is currently developing work around the figure of mythical sorceress Tlachtga and the suppressed female histories that surround the origins of Samhain.
Her first feature length film Ghost Dust premiered in 2024, following an acclaimed trilogy of shorts: Supernova Cash Out (2020), Blood in the Butter (2019) and Rinse: Repeat (2018), and a recipe for cinematic alchemy called The Tommy the Tomato Show (2021). Her work has been screened at, among other venues and events: Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh; Hijack!, New York; Triskel Arts Centre, Cork; Wolf Kino, Berlin; Gallery X, Dublin; and Luminous Void Film Festival, Cork.
She is co-director of CineSalon Experimental Film Festival, Cork. At the 2024 edition she premiered Disruptive Coloration, a live cinema performance in collaboration with sound artist Mick O’Shea. She is associated with the influential Experimental Film Society (EFS), an autonomous entity for producing cinema through experimentation that was hailed by aemi as “the most active, prolific and intrepid group of experimental filmmakers in Ireland”.
Before moving permanently to Ireland in 2023, she studied film at the film conservatory at SUNY Purchase, New York and then worked in post-production for over a decade in New York City.
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SCREENING
Along with works by Shells and Max, this event will include films by three Irish filmmakers championed by Cinesalon:
Arran Tenzin Bradstock is a filmmaker and musician from Cork whose experimental approaches to filmmaking treat sounds and images as independent equals, and embrace unknowable results through randomised processes and improvisation. The resulting works are immersive and hypnotic, evoking surprisingly dreamlike states through their visually intense collaging of details of reality. https://
Aisling O Connell is a Cork City based artist, working mainly with film, performance, text and paint. She is interested in an active, working, moving image where the editing process is physical and spontaneous, and often there is an urgency to the whole thing. She is very interested in the notion of the encounter, the body in protest, the body in reconciliation and the body rooted in material. Her work is often a personal interpretation of marginalisation, social isolation and compulsive behaviours.
Kevin Casciani Nolan describes himself as: “Experimental Music/Filmmaker Attempting To Depict/Visualize My Current And Constant State Of Mind, Thoughts And Experiences With Psychotic Disorders Through Intrusive Soundscapes And Distorted Visual Expressions.” One of the most uncompromisingly personal and distinctive voices in Irish experimental cinema, his prolific output of experimental films and noise albums has created a dark but always compelling universe defined by raw inner struggle. https://
