Fergus Daly

Replay: a film for Robbie O'Flynn

The time is out of joint. At the All-Ireland hurling final, the referee has made a bad call. The sense is of a Cosmic-level injustice. As everything spirals out of control the colour red of the Cork jersey is swallowed up in a black hole.

I See a Darkness

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.

The Mirror of Possible Worlds: Kiarostami on Aran

“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.

Crimson: An Irish Trakl

A leading contemporary Irish-language poet (Gabriel Rosenstock) goes in search of the poet who haunts him, the Austrian Georg Trakl 1887-1914. Several years after translating Trakl into Irish, Rosenstock’s is a physical and spiritual journey to the grave of the one whose thoughts and words have replaced his own.

Immortal Stories

An artist (Esperanza Collado) seeking inspiration for a project based on the classic Irish novel Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin's unique anatomy of torture and cruelty) travels across Europe absorbing traces of the book in the locations of its setting and in the places associated with the writers it influenced (perhaps only Ulysses has been a more influential Irish novel). Immortal Stories is an exploration of those hidden zones of great cities haunted by literary ideas and characters. It depicts the endless wandering of an artist undergoing an increasingly detached and disjointed experience of contemporary life. In this latest feature-length work, documentarian and critic Fergus Daly again negotiates the intersection of art, cinema and philosophy.

Outliving Dracula: Le Fanu's Carmilla

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.

Welcome to Our Battle of Images

A documentary look at the filming of Armand Gatti's The Writing on the Wall

The Art of Time

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.

Experimental Conversations

Featuring a host of well-known filmmakers and critics including Nicole Brenez, Philippe Grandrieux and FJ Ossang (in France) and Maeve Connolly, Grace Weir, Clare Langan, Gerard Byrne, Vivienne Dick, and Maximilian Le Cain (in Ireland), Experimental Conversations draws links between Irish and French experimental filmmaking, highlighting the fact that experimental cinema can be an aesthetic and philosophical international dialogue.

Stephen Mackenna, or the Greek Occupation of the Irish Mind

This video work forms part of a broader attempt to re-envision Irish cultural history in order to better understand the Now, to follow repressed lines of development that, if pursued, might have led Ireland out of its insular tendencies much earlier. The life and works of Irish writer Stephen MacKenna (1872-1934) form the documentary material on which the piece is built. MacKenna is best known for his translation from Ancient Greek of Third century philosopher Plotinus.

Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living

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.

Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living

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.