Filmmaker Flora Kerrigan, born in Cork in 1940, attended Crawford Art College before becoming an active member of the Cork Cine Club in the late 1950s and 1960s. Over eight years, she crafted remarkable animation and live-action shorts on 8mm film, earning international accolades and an airing on RTÉ. The surreal playfulness of her animations belies the painstaking meticulousness of their production, while her live-action films, featuring friends and family, are absurd, comedic, haunting and, most strikingly, explore female sexuality and desire. Many of her live-action films are located on the recognisable streets of Cork city. Speaking to ‘The Cork Examiner’ in 1961, Kerrigan explained that “it takes almost 2,000 cut-outs for a two-minute cartoon … it’s work that requires infinite patience but it is very satisfying and less expensive than ordinary filmmaking.” Kerrigan’s filmmaking life appears to have ended when she moved to London in the late 1960s. However, she pursued a creative life, taking photographs and becoming involved in activism through the Women’s Liberation Movement. She also wrote poetry under the pseudonym Eamer O’Keefe, where some of her earlier themes and her interest in graphics and typography elements were carried through from her filmmaking.
Kerrigan’s work was recently rediscovered through a collaboration between the IFI Irish Film Archive and Maynooth University. Flora looked after her films minding them carefully in Cork and London and bringing them home when she returned to Ireland some years ago to the care of her family. Her films came to the attention of Dr Sarah Arnold (MU) and Kasandra O’Connell (IFI) during their collaboration on the Women in Focus research project. The films are now preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive.
We have presented this collection with a new music accompaniment by renowned avant-garde free-improvisational pianist Paul G. Smyth and double bass virtuoso John Edwards.
Restored with support from ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes and the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme as part of A Season of Classic Films 2024.
This presentation was funded through the Research Ireland New Foundations Grant Number NF/2024/11760. Flora Kerrigan: Dream Maker was identified as part of the Women In Focus project, which was funded by Research Ireland and the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities scheme. The project was a collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University and the University of Sussex, with the IFI Irish Film Archive and East Anglian Film Archive as archive partners.
