Concrete Keys

Phantoscope, Triskel’s quarterly experimental film event, is thrilled to present CONCRETE KEYS, the visionary feature debut by Cork-based artist Natasha Bourke. 

CONCRETE KEYS is an experimental feature film that creates a poetic parallel universe to evoke the tragic and poignantly comic structures of self-preservation in an ever-changing world. It is peopled by a cast of institutionalised beings/’selves’, without a recognizable institution, locked into absurd ritualistic routine while presided over by authoritarian if incompetent matron manager, ‘Business Clown’. The ‘selves’ represent constructs of her mind or symbols for the repeated mass of feminine potential locked away for years under an archaic system. The long semi-transparent guises of these anonymised figures brings the film close to puppetry or animation in tone, linking them as part of a system that is at once comically strange and disturbingly familiar. An overlap accentuated by the documentary reality unfolding amidst the film’s dreamlike action and atmosphere. 

“There were few more bracingly original experiments this year than Natasha Bourke’s CONCRETE KEYS.” Donald Clarke, The Irish Times