N.S.E.W is an experimental research film set in a parallel now — a world shaped by collapse, confusion and collective burnout. Named after the four directions, the piece maps a disoriented global state where movement feels constant but directionless. The film reflects on late-stage capitalism, hyper-individualism, digital isolation and the emotional consequences of acceleration. It sits between dystopia and utopia, using image, sound and structure to explore how community fractures and reforms under pressure. Part of a wider body of research on third spaces, collective care and emotional infrastructure, N.S.E.W is a visual essay on living through shared panic and finding traces of hopecore in the wreckage. — Written, directed, filmed and edited by Michaela Cullen Instagram: @michaelachristinacullen

A film by Michaela Cullen A hallucinatory slipstream through grief, girlhood, and mythic decay. Leechcraft unfolds in an abandoned church swallowed by wilderness — a crumbling threshold between the sacred and the feral. Here, the dead speak in spores, the soil remembers what we try to forget, and the divine is feral, feminine, and full of rot. Told through flickering images, broken narrative, and a soundscape that hums like a haunted breath, this film explores post-religious ritual, Irish folklore, and the slow, soft violence of transformation. A hymn for the haunted. A dream for the dirt. A love letter to the parts of us we bury too soon. ––– Credits Directed, written, edited & scored by Michaela Cullen Camera: Pearce Cullen Sound Design: Michaela Cullen Narrative & Voice: Michaela Cullen

Battle Spasm A film by Michaela Cullen Battle Spasm is an experimental moving image work set in a speculative future, a hundred years after collapse. The piece follows a solitary figure who continues to record, not to preserve history, but to stay in conversation with the fragments that remain. It moves through broken narrative, private ritual, and emotional residue — a nonlinear meditation on detachment, memory, and repetition. The film draws on the artist’s longstanding interest in Irish diaspora, the internal architecture of trauma, and how meaning is generated through personal myth. There is no clear timeline. Scenes loop, shift, and disappear. The work resists coherence in favour of atmosphere and feeling. Sound, voice, and gesture are used not to guide but to disorient. Dialogue misfires. Audio glitches. Images fragment and return. These are not technical errors, but part of the language of loss. Throughout, the film asks how we process what we can’t fully articulate — what gets carried forward, unconsciously, and what collapses under the weight of trying to be remembered. Influenced by feminist approaches to time, symbolic psychology, and the emotional detritus of living through systems in decay, Battle Spasm occupies a space between memory and projection. The figure at its centre is not a character in the traditional sense, but a vessel — a way to move through repetition, stillness, and the desire to reconstruct something out of what’s already broken. This is not a search for closure, but a return to the same place, over and over, until something unnamed begins to make sense.

A collaboration between Michaela Cullen and Declan Colquitt Presented as part of Life in a Northern Town at The NewBridge Project, Gateshead, this experimental video installation responds to questions of Northern identity through Irish myth and rave culture. The work layers moving image by Michaela and sound by Declan, alongside perspex transfers, to construct a fragmented pilgrimage—part mythic journey, part club memory. The film follows three golem-like figures inspired by the Morrígna—Badb, Macha, Nemain—rambling across misty landscapes toward Hy-Brasil, an island from Irish folklore visible only once every seven years. Projected onto a freestanding screen and viewed from custom bleachers, the piece shifts the gallery into a ritual space. The accompanying score—ambient, warped techno—echoes the highs and crashes of Northern rave culture, evoking shared nostalgia and disillusion. Informed by personal and collective memory, folklore, subcultural histories, and the failures of post-rave optimism, Double Dropping on a Phantom Island is a visual-sound meditation on myth, place, and temporal dislocation. — Credits Moving image: Michaela Cullen Sound design and score: Declan Colquitt Installation design: Michaela Cullen