Explore the Silent Film Festival Programme

The Little Cinema Galway and Silent Film Festival Galway are excited to announce the Silent Short Film Challenge! Teams are invited to make a Silent 5-minute film, with NO sound! Only music is allowed to be added to the films.
If there’s enough interest, there may be an option to have a piano player play live alongside your film!
These films will be screened in the Little Cinema Galway at Seven on Wednesday 24th September at 8pm.
All films must be submitted to littlecinemagalway@gmail.com by Monday 22nd September. Get in touch to register your interest in making something.
Tickets for the screening will be available next week on the Little Cinema website, looking forward to seeing what people make!

This event celebrates the past, present, and future of silent film. The programme begins with the Silent Cinema & Film Studio produced 2021 silent documentary The Birth of Cinema, with live piano accompaniment by Agustina Taborda. We’ll also reflect on three years of the Silent Cinema Galway and look ahead to what’s coming up next.

There will be a Silent Cinema Forum which invites attendees to give five-minute talks sharing personal reflections, insights or research on silent cinema. If you want to participate, do not hesistate to contact us.

Throughout the event, enjoy an exhibition of rare 1920s photographs from collector John Garbo, featuring Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, George O’Brien, and other silent screen legends.

A late-night collision of art, music and pure imagination. DJ brings a live soundtrack to some of the boldest surrealist and Dada films ever made, including works by Maya Deren, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí.

One night only at The Blue Note… where cinema gets strange.

The Stars of “Flesh and the Devil” — together again!

In Imperial Russia, Anna Karenina falls in love with the dashing military officer Count Vronsky and abandons her husband and child to become his mistress. Taking full advantage of the star power, a drama was scripted based on Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel, Anna Karenina. The result was a failure for the author's purists, but it provided the public with a taste of Gilbert-Garbo eroticism that would never again be matched.

Music accompaniment by Mila Maia (piano).

Preceded by work-in-progress monologue from Garbo ACTUALLY Talks! starring John Dalton and written by Holly Buckley and John Dalton.

One of the most iconic masterpieces in cinema history, Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) shook filmgoers worldwide and changed the direction of the art form.

At a local carnival in a small German town, hypnotist Dr. Caligari presents the somnambulist Cesare, who can purportedly predict the future of curious fairgoers. But at night, the doctor wakes Cesare from his sleep to enact his evil bidding…

Incalculably influential, the film’s nightmarishly jagged sets, sinister atmospheric and psychological emphasis left an immediate impact in its wake (horror, film noir, and gothic cinema would all be shaped directly by it).

Musical accompaniment by Antonis Kalamoutsos, Brendan Pooley and Mia Fitzgerald.

Step back into the 1920s and join us at the Soul Garden transformed ‘speakeasy’ for a night of cabaret, dancing, live performance and risqué silent films. This event is a celebration of the wild spirit of the Jazz Age… where glamour meets mischief. And if you know the right people, you just might find a sip of “bootleg” refreshments… but don’t breathe a word to the Gardaí. Strictly over 18s.

Join silent film historian Dr. Veronica Johnson for an exploration of trailblazing filmmaker Lois Weber, one of the most influential figures of early cinema.

The most successful female director of her era, Weber was celebrated for weaving together social critique, moral dilemmas, and intimate human stories in ways that helped shape the silent screen.

This event features a screening of Weber’s powerful melodrama Shoes (1916), a stark and compassionate portrait of poverty and desperation. Shoes tells the story of a shopgirl that is too poor to buy a pair of shoes and is tempted to prostitute herself to get money. She falls ill after walking in the rain with her broken pair of shoes. In the end, she accepts the offer of a man she meets in The Blue Goose club. The next evening, she follows him to a 'flat for rent'.

Music accompaniment by Mia Fitzgerald (piano).

Experience Oscar Wilde’s scandalous biblical drama through Alla Nazimova’s dazzling 1923 silent film Salomé. Adapted from Wilde’s banned one-act play, the film follows the princess Salomé, who agrees to perform the infamous "Dance of the Seven Veils" for King Herod in return for the head of John the Baptist.

With its striking art deco design and stylised performances, Salomé stands as one of the earliest American films to boldly embrace queer sensibilities, both in its production and its decadent aesthetic. Today, it is celebrated as a landmark of queer film history and a rare example of avant-garde silent cinema.

Music accompaniment by Thomas Quill (piano).

One of the most emotional film experiences of any era, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc is a miracle of the cinema, an enigmatic and profoundly moving work that merges the worlds of the viewer and of saintly Joan herself into one shared experience of hushed delirium.

Dreyer’s film charts the final days of Joan of Arc as she undergoes the debasement that accompanies her trial for charges of heresy – through her imprisonment and execution at the stake. The portrayal of Joan by Renée Maria Falconetti is frequently heralded as the all-time finest performance in the history of film, and Dreyer’s unusual and virtuosic method, in seeming to render the very soul of his actress, vaulted the director decisively into the ranks of the art form’s supreme geniuses.

Presented in St. Nicholas’ Church, the screening will be accompanied live by Mila Maia (piano, flute) and Michael Chang (violin), creating an immersive encounter with one of the most transcendent works of art ever made.