Adrian Duncan
Directing
Biography
Adrian Duncan is an Irish artist and writer. He has published four novels, a collection of short stories and a book of non-fiction titled Little Republics: The Story of Bungalow Bliss. His novels and his short-story collection have been selected for several book prizes. Duncan's film works have screened in competition and in official selections at CPH:DOX, IFFR, Karlovy Vary, HotDocs, Biografilm, IDFA, RiDM, Dokufest, among others. From 1995 Duncan studied and worked as a structural engineer for over a decade in the UK and Ireland. He received his chartership from the IEI (Irish Engineering Institute) in 2007, before returning to study fine art and visual culture at IADT, Dún Laoghaire and NCAD, Dublin. He is a contributing editor at Paper Visual Art Journal and PVA Books (IRL/DE).
Known For
How do you generate structures that won’t collapse, even under the worst imaginable conditions? This roving travelogue forges unexpected connections between ambitious Parisian structures and the tensions surrounding the gilets jaunes protests.
Tension Structures
In 1946, a young forester was dispatched to the north of Finland to find trees large enough to serve as electricity poles in Ireland. The only surviving record of his hazardous mission are a few telegrams he sent to the home front. Directors Feargal Ward and Adrian Duncan literally follow in his footsteps in this tough trek through the subarctic wilderness, captured in dreamlike, hallucinatory scenes. The fantastic soundscape with high-pitched, sparse tones only intensifies the sense of desolation and mystery.
Memory Room
An Irish geologist teaching in Italy gets a call from a Berlin hospital: her estranged father, whom she hasn't seen for over 30 years, is unconscious after a fall. As his next of kin, she is asked to come to Berlin. Over the course of a night in her father's Berlin apartment she learns from his diaries about a trip he took with a friend to Italy in the early 2000s to research fascist-era buildings and sculptures. It is a trip that ended in tragedy. Latina, Latina is a timely and moving hybrid-documentary that looks at a political ideology through the objects and buildings it left behind.
Latina, Latina
Floating Structures follows a researcher travelling across central and southern Europe seeking out an array of buildings and structures that seem as though they have emerged from another world. Our mysterious guide, drawing on the ideas and visions of the great Irish engineer Peter Rice, explores the hinterlands that surround and gave rise to these structures. It is a rail trip of revelation that wanders from the quiet Bavarian town of Haßfurt, to the inner and outer realms of Paris, to the Andalusian city of Seville. Suspended artefacts and ruins from the distant future and the industrial past are sifted through and interlinked with precision and wonder.
Floating Structures
A film told from the centre circle of a football pitch. It is a poetic analysis of the aesthetics of football.
Prosinečki
A silent-film love story told through a public sculpture in Berlin of the 19th-Century Romantic-era poets Bettina and Achim von Arnim.