Caoimhín Gaffney

Far from the reach of the sun was first shown at a solo exhibition at Ormston House as part of EVA International, and was then shown at a solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Institute CAI02 in Sapporo, Japan, a solo screening at FACT Liverpool, a solo exhibition at Outburst Queer Arts Festival, Belfast, and a screening at Aarhus Art Weekend, Denmark. Film Festival screenings included the Korean Queer Film Festival, Seoul, and the Cork Film Festival.

Far from the reach of the sun is set in a near future where a government-approved drug can alter your sexuality. The corporation marketing the drug targets gay people who have checked into a cruising resort which doubles as a gay conversion therapy facility. The film revolves around the protagonists sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings; tumultuous worlds at odds with the power structures surround them, and reflects on the effects of isolation and homophobia on a queer person’s relationship with themselves and others, and the plethora of stereotypes and contradictory messages that queer people navigate daily.

The film interpolates archival footage of a gay & lesbian run church in Manchester in the 1990s. Both the fictional and archival footage have a commonality in theme, in that both feature organisations pressuring vulnerable queer people to ‘become straight’; yet, the subject matter shifts from the speculative fiction of a pill that can alter one’s sexuality to a church set up by the LGBTQ+ community in the 1990s as a safe-haven to escape persecution. This intercutting of the archival footage introduces a temporal shift (from an undefined future to the 1990s) and a spatial shift (from an undefined location to to a very recognisable Manchester)- grounding and reframing the absurdity of the fictional footage in recent histories of young peoples suicide attempts and exorcisms performed on them by religious figures.

Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland’s Film Project Award.