Doors 6:30p
Show 7:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We are thrilled to welcome filmmaker and artist Declan Clarke to UnionDocs for an evening dedicated to two of his incredible films: Saturn and Beyond (2021) and How I Became a Communist (2023).

Spanning histories both planetary and political, these films exemplify Clarke’s uniquely essayistic approach—meticulous, layered, and quietly radical. With a blend of personal memory, archival excavation, and formal precision, he constructs poetic inquiries into technology, ideology, and the fragile conditions of human understanding.

Saturn and Beyond reflects on our attempts to communicate across vast distances—through airwaves, spacecraft, and memory itself. From the birth of telecommunications, the rings of Saturn, and into the ravages of Alzheimer’s, the film moves between scientific ambition and intimate loss. Shot on 35mm, 16mm, video, and slide film, it is also a meditation on obsolescence—of machines, mediums, and minds.

How I Became a Communist is both a portrait of rural life and a meditation on political imagination. Set on a small farm in the Irish borderlands, the film gently observes daily rituals while weaving in elements of Grimm’s The Musicians of Bremen and the fractured history of leftist movements in Europe. It’s a subtle, deeply felt work that asks what remains of revolutionary desire, and where we might still find its echoes.

Declan Clarke will be in conversation with Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator of Film at MoMA following the screening to discuss the historical research, personal reflections, and political undercurrents that shape these two deeply thoughtful films.

This is the first of two evenings with Declan Clarke at UnionDocs. Don’t miss the NYC premiere of his newest film If I Fall, Don’t Pick Me Up on August 21st!

For more Declan Clarke, follow the link to listen to his episode on the UnionDocs podcast, Artistic Differences, where he discusses his films films, Saturn and Beyond (2021) and Group Portrait With Explosives (2014).

You won’t want to miss these events! These events are kindly supported by Culture Ireland.

Program

How I Became A Communist

55 min, 2023,  Ireland

Taking as its starting point the famous European folktale of The Musicians of Bremen, first published in Germany in 1819 by the Brothers Grimm, ‘How I Became a Communist’ uses this old story to reflect on the decline of a unified left wing political movement in Europe since the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. The film also depicts the daily life of an elderly woman running a farm in the Irish countryside on the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

The necessary routine of farm life, the lives of the animals who live on the farm, and the complex history of the area all combine to tell an unusual story about animal solidarity and the desire to revolt against oppression of all kinds.

Saturn and Beyond

60 min, 2021,  Ireland

Saturn and Beyond traces the discovery of the connection between lightening and electricity, and how this understanding developed into firstly electrical communication, and expanded to transcontinental communication and ultimately broadcasting. The film considers how the development of telecommunications and air travel led ultimately to the exploration of the solar system, and, humankind’s desire to send signals to the further regions of the known universe. Most specifically it looks at our relationship with the planet Saturn, the furthest planet in the solar system visible to the human eye.

Lastly, the film considers the decline of the human mind and the recent exponential growth of Alzheimer’s disease and dementias. As humans begin to live longer, cases of Alzheimer’s and dementia are increasing, and a 2019 report published by the World Health Organisation stated that there are ten million new cases of dementia each year. Dementia related deaths have more than doubled between 2000 and 2016, and it is anticipated to overtake cancer as the leading cause of health related human deaths within the coming decade.

Filmed in 35mm and 16mm film, Saturn and Beyond also includes video footage, dia slide film, and analogue photography, its very materials chronicling the development and recurring obsolescence of new imaging technology, as it relays the history of the recurring obsolescence of each new phase of broadcasting technology.

Bios

Declan Clarke, born Dublin, Ireland 1974 is a filmmaker and artist.

His films have been included in the FID-Marseille International Film Festival; Doclisboa, Portugal; the Villa Medici Film Festival, Rome; UNDER|DOX Munich; the Punto da Vista IDFF of Navarra, Spain; Beldocs IDFF, Serbia; Festival en Ville, Brussels; Tromsø International Film Festival, Norway; the F/Stop Film Festival, Leipzig; the St. Petersburg International Science Film Festival, Russia; FIDBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Jeonju IFF, South Korea; The New York Underground Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival, also in New York.

His film Saturn and Beyond won the Georges De Beauregard International Award at FID Marseille IFF 2021. In 2024 his film If I Fall, Don’t Pick Me Up received the Mention Spéciale du Jury de la Compétition Internationale at FID Marseille IFF. His forthcoming feature film All the Renaults in the World won the Kodak Prize and the 2022 edition of FID Lab.

In 2016 he won the Jury Prize at the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. In 2002/03 he represented Ireland on the PS1/MoMA International Residency Programme.

Sophie Cavoulacos is an Associate Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York where she organizes moving image projects across the museum’s cinemas and galleries.