Beara filmmaker's new feature debuts at festival

A FILMMAKER returned to his West Cork roots as the setting for his feature which will premiere at the Cork Film Festival on Thursday November 16th.

Solitaire was written and directed by Maximilian Le Cain, and it will screen at the festival this Thursday at 8.30pm at the Triskel Arts Centre. Solitaire is Max’s seventh feature film, and stars Natasha Bourke and Aisling O’Connell in an unsettling ghost story, touching on themes of family, home, and identity.

Max grew up in the Beara Peninsula. Like many artists his appreciation for the area has grown in the years after leaving. ‘I think growing up you can take the beauty and the landscape for granted. It’s probably in the last five years I’ve really come to appreciate it,’ says Max.

For Max, Solitaire filmed in the house of his late mother in Eyeries. ‘It was emotional. It’s an old house and there were traces of my family living there but also there’s a feeling of traces of people many years before that living there, like older ghosts.’

Solitaire is wordless, but even without dialogue sound plays a huge part in the film with sounds recorded which are inaudible to the ear and reworked into the sound of the film. The sound in the film was created by Cork based composer Karen Power whose work spans compositions for orchestras, to sound for film to sound installations.

Filmmaker Maximillian Le Cain.

Max has many different influences, including silent movies, horror movies, and westerns. In some ways, Solitaire touches on all of these influences, with a character returning to a place of their past to put something right.

Max’s filmmaking style is to allow some improvisation from his actors, letting the action develop in real time. ‘I sometimes don’t really know what the film is until the last day of editing,’ says Max. ‘There’s a genuine mystique about being in control. Chance plays a big part and in some ways you work opportunistically. It’s like working as a documentary maker.’

This isn’t the first time Max has returned to Beara to film; his short film Daughter of the Sun, a re-imagining of the legend of the Hag of Beara (Cailleach Beara), was also filmed there.

Max is the 2023 UCC Arts Council Film Artist in Residence and a member of the Experimental Film Society, a group that has played a pivotal role in developing Irish experimental cinema. ‘I’ve been working incessantly over the past 25 years, and I’ve gone off in a lot of strange directions but I do a lot of ‘mainstream’ filmmaking also.

Max is currently working on a new project with his wife Shelly Camille called Now and Forever, a sci-fi mockumentary on the subject of marriage and weddings. This one has plenty of influences too, not least Max and Shelly’s Las Vegas wedding earlier this year!

In addition to making films, Maximilian Le Cain promotes experimental film through programming, writing and education. He organises Phantoscope at Triskel Christchurch Cinema and co-organises CineSalon at the Guest House Project, both events which showcase experimental films and filmmaking in Cork.

Solitaire will screen at Triskel Arts Centre on November 16th and afterwards Max will participate in a UCC Film Artist in Residence ‘In Conversation’ following the screening. Solitaire was funded by The Arts Council Solitaire. It is likely to also screen at the Berlin Film Festival, among others.

See www.corkfilmfest.org