A programme of moving image work by women, in celebration of International Women’s Day 2026.
This collection celebrates artists whose work sits transverse to formal boundaries, making visible the often unseen processes behind the moving image. As the image is transformed through splicing, sewing, mark-making and the deliberate shifting of frames, each work reveals the presence of its maker.
These films foreground the labour and experimentation that shape how images come into being. They invite viewers to encounter the moving image as something porous and continually in the act of becoming.
In bringing the process to the surface, the programme honours the creative agency of women filmmakers, those who expand the frame and carve out new spaces for seeing and being seen.
This programme curated by Katie McFadden as part of the International Women’s Day programme of events, was originally screened in the Beanbag Cinema from Thursday 5th to Sunday 8th March, 2026. Both the in person programme and this online version is part of Belfast Film Festival’s SPARKS project, supported by BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery.
Fabric Film
Penny McGovern 5 minutes
Acousmatic through Abstraction
Oonagh O’Brien 4 minutes
There is no death
Jude Bird 3 minutes
Great Uncle Joe
Michelle Malone 11 minutes
Response from art writer Hannah Francesca
no i never heard it at all
When she handed it to me, there outright, on her outstretched palm It
was sweating. Sweating? Wet anyways. I nodded, as if knowing.
As if I hadn’t remembered who I was in the other room, just before.
Well, are you coming? I’ll show you.
The beginning is over there, look – Are you keeping the time, or should
I? I see you counting, fingers long Pruney and soft, too long submerged. Wet anyways.
Stretch your leg, in its entirety, there.
Now the other.
Unfurling as if wakening.
Wet anyways.