Solax's We Came This Far brings together filmmakers from across the globe for a programme that explores migration, identity, family, and belonging. Taking place in the Sean O'Casey Community Centre, the festival reflects the city's changing cultural landscape while creating space for stories that might otherwise remain outside the mainstream.
It is a sweltering evening that ushers in the second instalment of Solax's We Came This Far. For the uninitiated, Solax is a film club that has showcased global cinema for the last six years, across the Republic of Ireland and Brazil. While Ingrid Machado is the club's official heartbeat, she's keen to impress upon me, over Zoom, that Solax isn't her own project, and that without the surrounding community of immigrants and Irish people alike, the club simply wouldn't exist. "I did it alone for a long time," she says, in a considered tone that punctuates her warmth, "but it would have been so much harder without the support of the whole community. It's a mix of immigrants and Irish people, people from all walks of life."
And despite the heat, the dedicated chatter of English and other languages steadily filling the hall. The diversity of cultures and nationalities that make up Dublin's fabric often goes understated, but in this room, people flick between Portuguese, Spanish, and English at the drop of a hat, and there's a palpable excitement in the air. As Ingrid introduces the club and the filmmakers, the care paid to curation is obvious. "I never wanted it to feel like an academic space," she tells me afterwards, "where people think they need strong opinions to be there."
The lights go down, and we're met with Lullaby, directed by Olga Zhernovkova, a short that distils a nursery rhyme into animated film. It's poignant, and a beautifully surprising way to begin the festival, an examination of the bodily transformation that is a defining, unifying experience of entering the world. Things My Father Gave Me by Victor Carvalho drills into similar territory, recognising the similarities between himself and his father, in body and in behaviour. It's poignant, and reveals itself through a churning set of images that shift between home footage and newer art-house expression. In a similarly restless register, Not My Home Not My Choice by Harun Nergiz takes an almost claustrophobic look at domestic space, detailing rapid urban development and estrangement from a house filled with textured memory. Together, both are reminders of the importance of immigrant voices reaching for themes that feel near universal.
I ask Ingrid about this, and her eyes brighten as she describes the programming. "I just wanted to follow the cycle of life, to have us look at each other and see that immigrants are just other human beings," she explains, her passion palpable. "It doesn't matter where you're from, there's something about being human, right now, that we can all understand in each other."
A trailer for Ingrid's own documentary, Mother of Men, follows, an exciting prospect given she's currently on residency developing it. The film examines the specific context of her own family, but reaches for wider, more universal themes of female invisibility, ones that resonate readily with an Irish audience too. The film retraces her family history as far as her grandmother, a woman who is remembered in the community but forgotten by history.
Through interviews with elders from a rural village in Brazil to the records of local government, what the trailer hints at is a story of mental illness, witchcraft, and heritage. And what is absolutely certain is the excitement to see it in all of its realised glory!
It's followed by Women Who Sing, by Lebanese filmmaker Cindy Chehab, which examines the Zar ritual as a space for feminist reflection. In dialogue with Chehab's family archive, it explores memory and internalised patriarchy. It feels like a swift departure from the first two films' sudden moment of consciousness. The audience is confronted with culture as a force for both emancipation and repression. The programme moves through a kind of life cycle. First, birth, then inheritance, childhood memory, belonging to a family before slowly turning the subject into a subject of society, and landing squarely back in reality. PYTAGUA by Sara Quintana is the most abstract film on offer. A hand scribbling across a retro projector, dual-screen images, an ambiguous narration, and the lingering image of a man swimming through river reeds closes off a memorable short from the Mexican-born director.
File Not Found, by Sneha Joshi, deals with the idea that the places in our imaginations may never have actually existed. Through digital renderings reminiscent of early-2000s internet, and the yearning for family that shapes the existence. The idea that people exist in limbo between visits, as meeting again through a time-warp, is a particular level of vulnerability that is as astute as it is memorable.
However, A Bummer Day, directed by and starring Rachel Milita, is a fun, pulpy, linear story of a woman having a spectacularly bad day – fighting with her girlfriend, her boss, a man on the street. Nothing about it reaches for metaphor or grand statement. It's scrappy, funny, and grounded entirely in Dublin, and after the more contemplative films that preceded it, that recentring feels like exactly the right jolt.
Marcelo Medeiros Cruz Fidelis's Go Home wears its provocation on its sleeve – the title alone a jarring, effective slap for anyone in the audience. It's the point in the programme where Machado's careful arc, built through birth, inheritance, and departure, finally lands back in the present tense, and lands hard. Go Home refuses to sit back, invoking the memory of the terrifying voice notes that circulated during the Dublin riots. Using the aesthetics of horror, it asks the audience a different kind of question than the earlier films' themes of universal human experiences. After all, what happens when that recognition is not respected?
As if in natural response, The Invisible Ones by Jesús Tiscareno examines the precarious working conditions that enable the marginalisation and abuse of gig-economy drivers in Dublin. Through interviews with masked workers from Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America, it details the various ways they are exploited, harassed, and occasionally abused on the city's streets. Ingrid described her choice to end on these two films: "Toward the end of the programme, you have more denouncing, more warning pieces – but they bring us back to the present moment, to what's happening right now, and it gets a bit more political. I think that's important to talk about. I didn't want to just brush it off, or leave it too metaphorical, because that's also difficult." What's revelatory is the moment the drivers take their balaclavas off – unafraid to speak out, and optimistic that reform can still be achieved.
We don't have time to stay for the discussion afterwards, a defining feature of the Solax Film Club that Ingrid is keen to impress upon me, in her characteristically warm way. As we step back out into the beautiful Dublin evening, I am struck by the arc of the programme, moving from the universal human experience and into the political world of marginalisation, and the necessary work of pushing back against the notion of a singular "immigrant experience." There is so much life, such variety to explore, an ethos at the very core of what Solax does. “I totally disagree with the idea that experimental filmmaking isn't accessible; it's about how it's presented,” Ingrid explains. Our conversation has run much longer than anticipated, but her knowledge of film and its implications is riveting. “Sometimes the place it's shown, the timing, the whole arrangement around it, is the issue – not the film itself, or the words used to talk about it. If you start using very polished, highbrow language, how do you expect people to feel invited in, beyond a small group?”
And the optimism runs deep. Ingrid is already thinking about the club's next chapter; with her own project taking shape, and a new Brazilian Film Festival launching in September, opening night September 21st, small clubs like Solax are the real engine room for the emerging voices of Dublin's multiculturalism, voices so often underrepresented in the mainstream. We Came This Far, and Solax's success more broadly, is proof of what community can do in championing the very best of emerging Irish work.
We Came This Far ii, took place on Friday, 17th July 2026 at the Sean O'Casey Community Centre in Dublin.
