Things To Do: Stand at a bus stop, browse some rare books, curate a magazine, spend the weekend watching movies

Our Picks

Our recommendations – no sponsored content, or adverts, just stuff we like.

Dublin Rare Book Fair

This weekend, the Dublin Rare Bookfair will be setting up shop at Flux Studios on Chatham Row.

Beginning at 11am on Friday, 12 June and running through until 5pm on Saturday, 13 June, the fair will bring together 20 book dealers from Ireland and the United Kingdom, with each exhibiting a wide range of antiquarian and second-hand books, maps, prints and other ephemera.

Up for sale will be rare and collectible books by a variety of Irish authors from the 19th to the 21st and current century, together with a huge range of books from around the world. Among the exhibitors expected are Joe Collins Rare Books, Stokes Books, Temple Bar Books, Swan River Press, Kelleher Rare Books, P & B Rowan, Worlds End Books and Black Gull Books.

The event is free, but the books will cost you, with prices ranging from €10 to over €10,000.

For more information, visit the Dublin Rare Book Fair website here.

Bloomsday Film Festival

For those of you who are sorely missing Arthur’s Day, we have some great news. Bloomsday is coming this Tuesday, and if you’re eager to kick off the festivities a bit early, the Bloomsday Film Festival is launching in Belvedere College on Friday.

At 5pm, the Belvedere townhouse will be screening a selection of short films and documentaries set in or about Dublin. The programme will feature works by filmmakers Sophie Meehan, Luis Avery, Cara Gaynor and MK Quane among others.

The must-see is Renata Lima and Silvio Severino’s The Peculiar Saga of Gubu Man, an experimental documentary, which follows the story of a former Dublin writer who is debilitated by a severe LED light sensitivity. Hindered in his ability to continue writing in a digital world of computer screens and smartphones, the “Gubu Man” – as he identifies himself – turns instead to the art of making clay dolls as a way to carry on creating novels through physical objects.

Tickets for the Dublin Short Stories event area on sale here.

Afterwards, at 7pm, there will be a special screening of autobiographical filmmaker Caveh Zahedi’s Ulysses, New York, a 24-part adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which attempts to do to the tome what Joyce did to Homer’s The Odyssey by transposing a canonical work into a new time, place and form.

In other words, Zahedi reimagines the events of 16 June, 1904, as having taken place on 16 June 2022 in New York City, on the centenary of the novel’s publication. Featuring eight actors performing in a Bloomsday stage production of Ulysses, Zahedi’s film moves between Joyce’s chapters onstage and the corresponding hours of the actors’ real day.

This special presentation features a work-in-progress version of the introductory episode, and will be followed by a discussion with Zahedi on the challenges of adapting Joyce.

Tickets are available here.

The Bloomsday Film Festival will continue until Tuesday, 16 June. For more information and to see the full programme, visit the event page here.

Queer Spectrum Film Festival

Gosh golly, it’s just raining film festivals this week.

Over in the Irish Film Institute, the third edition of the Queer Spectrum Film Festival will also be starting on Friday.

Ireland’s first film festival dedicated to LGBTQIA+ people of colour and migrant voices, this year’s event will be based around the theme of “tender migrations: queer journeys through desire, transition and healing” to explore how queer lives are continually reshaped across borders, generations and identities.

Running until Sunday, 14 June, the festival will open with the Irish premiere of Treat Me Like Your Mother by Lebanese filmmaker Mohamad Abdouni. Screening at 6.30pm on Friday, Abdouni’s documentary uncovers the intimate histories of transfeminine experiences in post-war Beirut. Using a blend of personal archives and storytelling, the film traces decades of visibility, survival and social integration within the city, and preserves histories that are often erased from public memory.

Abdouni will also be making an appearance to discuss the film afterwards.

Then, on Saturday, at 2.30pm, the cinema will stage the Irish premiere of Out Laws. Directed by James Lewis and Lexi Powner, the film follows Namibian activist Friedel Dausab as he challenges laws criminalising same-sex love, and confronts the colonial legacy behind anti-queer persecution.

Afterwards, there will be a 30 minute panel discussion with director Lewis.

At 4pm, Japanese director Anshul Chauhan’s drama TIGER, an exploration of family expectations, queer intimacy and self-reinvention, will be getting its Irish premiere. And finally, to close out the festival on Sunday, Xiaodan He’s Montréal, ma belle will be showing at 7.40pm. The story of a Chinese immigrant and mother living in Montreal, He’s work is described as a journey of forbidden love and long-overdue self-discovery.

It too will be followed by a discussion with director He.

To see what else is on the festival docket, and to secure your tickets, visit the IFI website here.

On the Way: An Artist’s Sermon

Next week, performance artist and writer Day Magee will be bringing their new production, On the Way: An Artist’s Sermon to Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar.

The sermon is described by Magee as follows:

“You are at a bus stop waiting for a bus – in short, you are following the rules. The bus is due, but has yet to arrive – the game itself is not following the rules.  

“You are approached by a fellow passenger-in-waiting, who begins to tell you a story about a bus driver. As to where the story goes, you will have to wait and see. It would appear that, either way, waiting is the name of the game.”

In On the Way, Magee will be delivering an artist’s sermon to their fellow artists, “a preaching to the choir”, on the rules that artists are expected to follow and break, and the rewards and punishments that they may seek.

Magee will be presenting their sermon at 7.45pm on both Tuesday, 16 and Wednesday, 17 June.

Leap Cards aren’t accepted. Tickets are available here.

BLAB

Back in March, journalist Barry Landy launched the high-concept music quarterly BLAB.

A celebration of the Irish music scene, each edition features interviews with four rising musical acts and features an eight-track cassette compilation. As a tie-in, Landy organises a gig in the Grand Social in which all four acts perform, and is followed up with a second gig, its line-up composed of groups or artists recommended by the featured acts.

On Wednesday, 17 June, the second issue of BLAB is set to launch in the Grand Social, and features the groups Telekura, Cable Boy, Eppie and For Nina. Each act has contributed two tracks to the BLAB002 tape, including demos and previously unreleased songs, and the magazine comes in four different versions, so you get to pick which group will be the cover star.

To get a copy of the magazine, the tape or a ticket to the gig, head on over to the BLAB website here. Or, you can follow them on Instagram here.

Flow

Finally, and to come full circle Finnegan’s Wake-style, we let the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, bringing us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Flux next Thursday.

As part of Pride Month, Flux will be hosting artist collective Flow’s first group exhibition. Featuring more than 30 artists, including photographers, designers, illustrators, musicians and DJs to celebrate queer inclusivity through creativity, self-expression and connection.

Among those on the bill are Tan Bridgerman, RJ the DJ, Sara Ribeiro, Patricia Moura, Morgane Fasola, Khia the Asylum, Johannah Fennessy, Jwy, Francis H. Rust, Cleide Regina, Betzy Nina and Caroline Porto.

Supported by Flux Studios, the Flow group exhibition will be held at the Clink i Lár hostel on Abbey Street Upper.

The evening will also be supporting Belong To Youth Services by helping to raise funds and awareness for LGBTQ+ young people across Ireland. Doors open at 7pm on Thursday, 19 June.

For more information, follow Flow over on Instagram here.

Come join us!

In seven sessions, members of our team will teach skills and knowledge that could be used in journalism, but also just by people who are involved in their communities and trying to make them better places.

Saturday 27 June and Sunday 28 June, mostly at 10-13 Thomas Street, in the Digital Hub, in Dublin 8. Tickets are €50 per session – pick as many or as few as you like.

Learn more

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Maria Butterly releases Transatlantic single "The Last Ship to Shore"

Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Maria Butterly has joined forces with Quebec guitarist and producer Martin Larose for the new single "The Last Ship to Shore".

Co-written with arranger Frank Corneau, the song is about longing to belong and setting out across deep ocean waters in search of a place to finally call home.

Listen to the single here.

Matt Kennard's Irregular Army

On Wednesday, 17 June, author and journalist Matt Kennard will be launching an expanded edition of his book Irregular Army at the Whistleblower on South Anne Street.

In Irregular Army, Matt Kennard delivers an exposé of how the US military’s recruitment crisis during the War on Terror opened the ranks to some of the most dangerous elements in American society: white supremacists, neo-Nazis, gang members, and convicted criminals.

This updated edition deepens the original’s urgent warning, connecting those recruitment policies directly to the rise of MAGA extremism, Trumpism, and the global resurgence of fascism.

The launch is at 6.30pm. Reserve a seat here.

Pinky Ring

On Thursday, 2 July, Pallas Projects will be presenting Scottish-Irish artist Struàn Bell’s Pinky Ring, the sixth exhibition of its 2026 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.

Pinky Ring is composed of a series of plaster relief carvings shaped by ideas of speculative function, symbolic architectures, and objects of personal affection

Accompanying Pinky Ring is a commissioned text by Cork-based curator Katie O’Grady who, on Thursday, 9 July, will be in attendance to discuss the exhibition.

For more information, visit the Pallas Projects website here.