AIC Bursary Award 2016: Collaborative Film – recipient

Artist in the Community Scheme Bursary Award 2016: Collaborative Film – recipient

Create is delighted to announce Eoin Heaney has been awarded the Arts Council Artist in the Community Scheme Bursary Award 2016: Collaborative Film.

Eoin is a filmmaker interested in total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound. Whether capturing behavioural esoterica or dealing with more civic minded topics his work intends to celebrate cinema, its poetry and latitude for open ended reflection, and hopefully influence people to think progressively about the lives they’re living.

Eoin has proposed to use the Bursary Award to further research and develop his collaborative filmmaking methodologies in terms of access and responsibility to audiences. Eoin is particularly interested in collaborating with the Deaf community in Ireland.

During an initial research phase Eoin will explore and engage with Ireland’s Deaf culture and language, the aim of which is to explore forms of physical performance (and how they translate to film) in an entirely visual manner. His hope is that through developing a cinematic grammar, which needs no interpretation or explanation for either the hearing or the Deaf, may knit the two communities of Deaf and hearing together as one cinematic audience. As Eoin has put it, “The creative challenge is to develop the ability to engage the Deaf community with something familiar and accessible while at the same time confronting and entertaining a hearing audience without compromise.”

Eoin studied film production in Ballyfermot College of Further Education and has worked extensively in the Irish film industry since his graduation. His work has been exhibited in art spaces and screened at festivals internationally and throughout Ireland.

Current work includes the collaborative writing of a feature screenplay, a drama set in Ireland’s Deaf community in the 1950s, funded through The Irish Film Board’s First Draft Loan scheme.

Previous collaborative projects have been produced with the Arts Council of Ireland, the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council/Health Service Executive Arts and Health Partnership, the Louth and Meath Training and Education Board, CBI Children’s Books Ireland, the Arts Council of Ireland, the Yeats Society, Sligo, Cork City Council and Mid-Summer Festival.

The Arts Council Artist in the Community Scheme Bursary Award 2016 aims to support individual professional filmmakers working in the area of collaborative film. The Arts Council has provided this €10,000 bursary award as part of the Artist in the Community Scheme, which is managed by Create. Create worked in partnership with Filmbase in delivering the Award.