Maximilian Le Cain
Filmmaker
“One of the loudest and most exciting new voices in experimental cinema of our time ” – Nikola Gocić, Film Panic
"An experimental moving image artist whose work decisively utilizes every element of filmmaking, human senses, instinct, and negative space as storytelling tools." - Cornelius Martin, Wick Monet
"A one of a kind filmmaker that I truly believe is among the greatest." - David Matthew Johnson, Octopus Marquee
Maximilian Le Cain has created a prolific and acclaimed body of moving image work including features, shorts, installations and film-related performances. He was The Arts Council / UCC (University College Cork) Film Artist in Residence for 2023. He is co-creator and co-curator of CineSalon, a Cork-based experimental film event and co-director of The CineSalon Experimental Film Festival.
His filmmaking proposes a personal relationship with cinema as a site of haunting. Accepted visual and storytelling codes are encouraged to collapse into a more personalised system that approaches moving imagery as an experiential construct open to possession by multiple claims of memory and interpretation. According to Aidan Dunne in The Irish Times, his works "don't so much challenge narrative and visual conventions as disregard them completely in an effort to find an intensely personal, honest means of addressing experience in all its strangeness and mystery… it is curiously, hypnotically watchable, it takes you to a place of such interiority that it is unsettling, even disturbing, but also very rewarding.”
Le Cain is affiliated with the influential Experimental Film Society (EFS), an autonomous entity explicitly designed for producing cinema through experimentation. He is also known for his collaborations with Vicky Langan which created an intimate but unsettling personal universe in film and performance across more than a decade.