Who counts?
country - ireland
partner - creative placemakers
project manager - alison brodie
The Bookend Film is a two-part work conceived as the framing structure for the entire MCSB anthology. Designed as a single film with a clear two-act structure, it is intended to open and close the weekender festival in Skopje in 2028 — meditating on the state of Europeanness at a meta level across all ten films in the project.
The film is rooted in a poetic, sonic, and visual response to what it means to exist at the fringes of Europe. The Irish creative team — poet Stephen James Smith and filmmaker/director Claire Dix — bring particular interest in Ireland's liminal position within the European context, and in the linguistic and cultural space inhabited by those who live between identities: neither fully inside nor outside a language, a tradition, a political bloc.
ARTISTS
poet/writer - stephen james smith
composer - ana krstajic
animator - krste gospodinovski
Who Counts?: first residency in Skopje
Who Counts? opens and closes the Moving Classics: Sonic Bridges anthology. It asks a simple question with no simple answer: what does Europe mean, and for whom? Europe is 27 states by one count and 44, 46, 48 or 50 by others. The film takes that uncertainty as its subject, looking from the places whose place in Europe has been conditional, deferred or contested.
The film brings together three artists from three countries: Irish poet Stephen James Smith, Macedonian director and animator Krste Gospodinovski, and Serbian composer and orchestrator Ana Krstajić. It is led by Creative Placemakers in Ireland, with producers Andy Brydon and Alison Brodie.
From 31 August to 4 September 2026 the team met in person for the first time in Skopje, the city where the anthology will premiere in 2028, hosted with the support of UMPACI. The days moved between the Solun Hotel, a working day at Netaville, and time in the city and its landscape: the Old Bazaar, one of Skopje’s clearest records of layered, cross-border history, and a boat trip on the river at Matka Canyon.
Each artist began by presenting their practice: spoken word and poetry film, animation, and composition for screen and concert hall. The team then worked from Stephen James Smith’s draft poem, which became the guiding text for the film. A review of the other nine films in the anthology found shared threads of layers, memory and personal experience. Who Counts? will frame these through metaphor rather than summarise them.
By the end of the week the film had a musical approach, built on drones and humming that Irish and Balkan traditions share, moving from fragments of memory towards a complete melody. It also had a visual concept: an abstract “identity MRI” that moves inside a single character, with a river in the landscape echoed in the blood moving through the body. A first treatment was drafted, recording options were mapped in Skopje, Belgrade and Wexford, and new links were made with Laboratorium and the University of Audiovisual Arts, Europa Prima, to build audiences in Skopje ahead of 2028.
The team returns to Skopje in December 2026 for its second residency, moving the film from treatment into recording and animation tests.
