This film could almost be a fiction dreamed up by Borges or Italo Calvino. The subject, Drako Oho Zarharzar, suffers from memory loss and lives entirely through a world of literal and fantastical imagery. The performance artist, and one-time model for Salvador Dali, cocoons himself in a tiny English council flat, navigating his daily rituals through a physical constellation of printed photographs that hang from the ceiling by dirty bits of string. The hanging images function to remind him of his past and who he might be in the present. Although, how much of the visual debris actually relates to his own life is highly suspect. Regardless, Drako's constructed reality is tangible to himself and provides him with a platform on which to stand. The documentary records a warm, developing relationship between Drako and filmmaker Toby Amies, as Drako struggles to remember yesterday, or who the man pointing the camera is. Amies's job as film-maker is often superseded by a de facto role of carer, and sometimes cleaner. In this way, the documentary is very much participatory, and the relationship being mediated by an image production technology seems fitting for a man who fantasises regularly about his past as a performer, model, and as someone who literally paints his facial hair in the morning. This film is funny, entertaining, sensitive and intelligent. I'm not sure if this would be better to show students of film and photography, or for those studying philosophies like Object Oriented Ontology. It is an entirely fascinating encounter with this individual's way of living, who readers of Timothy Morton might recognise as being viscous, nonlocal, and temporally undulating.
If you are disturbed by moving images depicting photographs of male genitalia, this might not be the film for you. However, I would highly recommend this as a birthday or seasonal gift for that ageing relative who loves human interest stories, and has a passion for gay pornography, light BDSM, and bespoke knitwear.
