Fergus Daly

Explores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society.

Through an interview with Kiarostami in the Aran Islands and interviews with film critics and scholars at Cannes, the director examines Kiarostami's themes and methods. The director also profiles Kiarostami as a poet and a photographer.

“Nature, the inexhaustible resource of encounters worthy of speechless communication,” declares Abbas Kiarostami in Fergus Daly’s beautiful journey. How can cinema free itself of its anthropocentric and industrial determinations? Each of the films presented here offers a solution, be it iconographic or technical, whether it involves renewing a representation or producing one’s own film reels, dancing with one’s whole body with nature as one’s partner or imagining a sound as animals might perceive it.

Shot in Paris, Death Valley, and the Nevada nuclear test site, this film essay examines the complex historical relationship between photography, cinema and science. The film explores the impact of chrono-photographic experiments of Irish-born Lucien Bull (1876 - 1972) on the developments of image-capture aesthetics and science throughout the 20th century, showing how technologies of vision were aggressively instrumentalised by the military-industrial complex, particularly by the nuclear testing industry. Using rarely-seen nuclear test footage alongside more poetic images and new film from the nuclear test site in Nevada, I See A Darkness questions cinema's relationship with the material world, with contributions from leading philosophers and writers.

Outliving Dracula explores the radical influence of the classic (and first) lesbian vampire story, JS Le Fanu's Carmilla, on generations of filmmakers - from Carl Dreyer's extraordinary Vampyr to Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses, from the Gothic kitsch of Hammer through to films produced for an art gallery context. Featuring interviews with leading film scholars and visual artists influenced by Le Fanu, Outliving Dracula seeks to redefine Le Fanu's critical importance as an Irish writer whose ghostly traces remain profound and enigmatic. This documentary suggests that Carmilla may perhaps be more radical and transgressive today as a creative wellspring than its successor Dracula.