In this Film Ireland podcast, Gemma Creagh talks to filmmaker Dean Kavanagh about his latest feature, Hole in the Head, a sophisticated and darkly comic exploration of the meeting point of traumatised memory and image technologies.
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Part-time projectionist and amateur filmmaker, John Kline Jnr, is mute and suffers from missing time. He hires local actors to play his parents in a series of recreated home movies in order to investigate their unsolved disappearance 25 years earlier.
Hole in the Head screens at the Irish Film Institute from 12th August 2022
Dean Kavanagh
Dean is a writer-director from Ireland. Over the past 18 years, he has created 70 short and 6 long-form films in the field of experimental cinema. His filmmaking intricately forges a new relationship between contemporary and legacy media formats, combining materialist film methodologies with a focus on narrative structure. His work is a fusion of experimental form with narrative storytelling, and has been described as part of "an important new direction in Irish cinema"." His films have screened at film festivals and cultural institutions internationally. Professor and scholar at University College Cork, Dr. Ciara Chambers, wrote that Kavanagh "paves the way for other filmmakers to share experimental work unapologetically with 'mainstream' audiences."
In 2022, Kavanagh's first feature drama, Hole in the Head, received an Irish theatrical release and earned critical acclaim. He is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland's prestigious Next Generation Artists' Award (2018) and was selected as Ireland's Berlinale Talent for the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival.
He is a member of Screen Producers Ireland (SPI) and the European Film Academy (EFA), and his filmmaking is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. Kavanagh also works as a film archivist.
