Remember the trails of the human hand in mid-Summer; the turning of the heavy head on the long grass to kiss in a slow & seismic submission. This is the localised feeling I get when watching Fergus Daly’s The Mirror of Possible Worlds (2022). Both filmmaker & theorist, Daly distills a lifetime of looking & thinking about the Iranian director, Kiarostami, into 24-minutes of sequential moving/still images, sentient text & an emotive soundtrack. The images localise Kiarostami on the Aran Islands when he visited there two decades ago. From the hot & closed immanence of Iran to the wet & open membrane of Aran, Daly portrays Kiarostami as a mirage of himself & to himself in the biographically severed narration & rich philosophical asides that address the “detachment”, “possessiveness”, “playfulness” & “compassion” of the director & his camera, what we might cheaply call auteur. In this tale, all authors disappear under the mask of indirect words & yearning images. “What is truly deep needs a mask” Daly narrates via Nietzsche. There's something small & local about Daly’s short that is tantamount to a golden pin-prick in the navy-black universe. It is a moment that went unnoticed for the many, & only exists as feeling for the few who stumbled with Kiarostami onto our shores with a camera in hand to stabilise the foreign landing. The word for this moment is localised not intimate. Localised plots the distance between Iran & Aran. And it also intimates the closeness & distance that Kiarostami plots in his filmmaking between the poles of place & poetry, documentary & fiction, world & lens. Perhaps the desperate metaphor of the Summer is a turning away from the present turning towards far away trauma, one that has been abstracted by distance, scale & the yellow & blue stripes of global support. But as Daly narrates vis-a-vis Kiarostami, “You can’t narrate trauma.” Daly is sharing the memory of being with Kiarostami in-person on Aran, while knowing that “sharing a representation is not preserving the sensation of being here, now. It’s a prosthetic memory.” Art, in its depth & breadth of thinking & feeling about place, always has a localising nature. —James Merrigan

Fergus Daly’s The Mirror of Possible Worlds is free to watch here