CULL PRODUCTIONS
An independent film production company based in the Irish Midlands, where myth and mud often share the same ground.
Founded by writer/director Emmet Byrne and producer Catriona Marshall, Cull makes films that are darkly humorous, psychologically charged, and rooted in the rhythms and realities of rural life.
Cull is an independent film production company based in the Irish Midlands, where myth and mud often share the same ground. Founded by writer/director Emmet Byrne and producer Catriona Marshall, Cull makes films that are darkly humorous, psychologically charged, and rooted in the rhythms and realities of rural life.
Cull’s perspective is shaped by a shared grounding in social reality as much as storytelling. Emmet’s background in Sociology and Politics brings a focus on power, inequality, and the systems that shape everyday life, while Catriona’s work as an Advanced Nurse Practitioner in older adult care and frailty offers an intimate understanding of vulnerability, dignity, and the human impact of institutional decisions. Together, this informs work that is socially alert, ethically grounded, and rooted in real human consequence.
Our work also draws heavily from mythology and the supernatural not as nostalgia, but as language. A way of speaking to the unseen forces that shape modern experience: guilt, care, decay, endurance, love. The films balance the intimate with the archetypal, using symbol and metaphor to illuminate everyday struggle. Stories that are grounded in empathy for those who carry too much: carers, workers, the overlooked and overextended.
Influenced by the tonal extremes of Martin McDonagh and David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Frank Berry. We embrace contradiction – finding beauty in brutality, humour in despair, and poetry in the plain.
The gods and ghosts of the old stories still echo in the quiet fields and half-lit kitchens of today’s Ireland, and through them we explore what it means to live with burden and hope, isolation and connection. Cull’s purpose is to make work that lasts. Stories that confront and connect, that unearth the mythic within the mundane, and that give voice to the quiet, haunting resilience at the heart of Irish life.
Psychopomp is a darkly lyrical horror-drama exploring care, memory, and the fragile dignity of living inside a failing body. Set against the overlapping pressures of dementia, delirium, and addiction, the film follows a family navigating love, exhaustion, guilt, and the strange distortions of reality that emerge when illness becomes a constant presence in the home.
Developed through close collaboration with artists whose lives have been affected by the themes therein, the film draws on lived experience as much as genre imagination.
Currently on the festival circuit.
Winner of the 2025 Cork 48-Hour Film Challenge. Screened at IndieCork.
A young sailor is hired by an enigmatic Doctor to guard her remote island property. As strange occurrences mount and his employer speaks of extraordinary scientific breakthroughs, he is drawn toward something ancient and unknowable, and cannot escape.
Shot in the tradition of German Expressionist silent cinema, complete with Dutch angles, exaggerated performance and Lovecraftian dread, The Seaman is a darkly comic, visually bold piece of genre filmmaking — made in 48 hours and screened at its full 2.76:1 anamorphic aspect ratio.
Directed by Lakshika Serasinhe. Written by Emmet Byrne with Breifne O'Rourke. Produced by Shane Groarke & Lakshika Serasinhe. Starring Emmet Byrne, Aoife Kelly, Hazel Ol, Mari Bezrukava.
Currently on the festival circuit.
A man walks into an office building and is subjected to a series of increasingly intense interviews and travails before ending up on the roof's edge of a tall building with a decision to make — before the final shot pulls the rug entirely.
A darkly comic, visually driven piece with a sting in the tail.
Written by and starring Emmet Byrne alongside Jarlath Tivnan, My Heart Goes is a music video for Galway singer-songwriter David Owens.
Directed and produced by Lakshika Serasinhe, with cinematography and colour grading by Maxim Baronin, the video brings together a talented creative team including art direction by Yvette Picque and VFX by Gabriele Toffoli. Released by Universal Music MENA.
Interested in collaborating? Reach out at cullproductionsteoranta@gmail.com