Projects matching: Ben Rivers

Synopsis

A man's solitary life in a Scottish highland forest is portrayed through the changing seasons, with occasional encounters disrupting his otherwise isolated existence.
The director revisits forest-dwelling hermit Jake Williams, the subject of his earlier film TWO YEARS AT SEA (2011).
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2024 - World premiere
Official Selection Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024
Official Selection CPH:DOX 2025

Synopsis

LOOK THEN BELOW was filmed in Somerset, a place transformed into a coloured, mist-enveloped island in an oily ocean with a cave basking in a subterranean glow. Time seems to stand still there.
After SLOW ACTION and URTH, this is the final part of a trilogy developed with American SF author Mark von Schlegell.
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2020 - Bright Future - Ammodo Tiger Short Competition - World premiere

Synopsis

In the town of Krabi, a popular tourist destination in southern Thailand, the pre-historic, the recent past and the contemporary capitalist world awkwardly collide. The town’s local folklore and histories are promoted as attractions to foreigners, while the town’s traditional labour force is muted and hidden from the tourists’ eyes. A nameless character, whose identity continually changes, takes us around town to explore various sites that capture Krabi in its current state. These sites uniquely illustrate how Krabi’s folklore is propagated and commodified to fill the need of tourism industry.
A docu-fiction work from Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong developed from ideas explored in their 2018 Thailand Biennale installation piece 'The Ambassadors'.
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2019 - Moving Ahead - World premiere
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2019 - Wavelengths
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Special Presentation

Synopsis

An abstract crime thriller featuring a poodle, a beauty queen, and two sisters who aren't sisters. The film eschews conventional narrative in favour of a more dream-like montage.
Based on Gertrude Stein's eponymously named screenplay and featuring a close personal network of friends and influences as cast.
Official Selection Cannes Film Festival 2019 - Directors' Fortnight - World premiere

Synopsis

By turns raucous and reserved, 'I Hope I'm Loud When I'm Dead' ponders the future of a world in flux as seen through the eyes of motherhood accented by poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2018 - Wavelengths - International premiere
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2019 - Bright Future

Synopsis

A beautiful and enigmatic collection: wedding architecture; animals; John Cage; and John Ashbery
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2018 - Wavelengths - International premiere

Synopsis

Shot in a creaky, wooden floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of Resistance (the title of Jean-François Lyotard’s unrealized follow-up exhibition to his 1983 Les Immateriaux), occasional collaborators Ben Rivers and Ben Russell have produced what initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round. This “appearance dimension” is deceptive, of course, and with the aid of an immersive 5.1 sound-mix, a Green Man, a Green-Man-shaped-Infinite-Void, a dose of kinetic digital magic (courtesy of US-based artist Peter Burr) and an impressive cast of thinkers, critics, curators and artists, a document of Resistance slowly transforms into 'The Rare Event' – a portal that joins all dimensions into one.
Official Selection Berlinale 2018 - Forum Expanded - World premiere

Synopsis

Captain Maurice Seddon, an inventor and eccentric in the great English tradition, made electrically heated clothing for ‘paraplegics, sclerotics, arthritics, rheumatics, the poor and landscape painters’. The details of his extremely modest, uncompromising way of life are here unpicked through a rich weave of incredible archival TV appearances from around the world (he featured on amongst others, the David Letterman show) plus very touching 16mm and mobile phone footage shot by friend and director William English. 'Heated Gloves' evokes Ben Rivers' 'Two Years at Sea' and the Maysles brothers' 'Grey Gardens', whilst highlighting the codes of television reportage and remaining in and of itself very special and unique – just like its subject. (LFF brochure)
BFI London Film Festival 2015 - World premiere

Synopsis

Shot on the otherworldly beaches of Morocco in silvery black-and-white 16mm Scope 'A Distant Episode' transforms behind-the-scenes footage into a dreamy film fragments depicting sci-fi incursions into a mythic landscape.
Official Selection Toronto 2015 - Wavelengths

Synopsis

'The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers' [the complete title of this piece] is partially inspired by Paul Bowles’ story 'A Distant Episode', and charts a mysterious transformation from observational making-of to inventive adaptation, shot against a staggering Moroccan landscape.
"Ben Rivers explores the illusion of filmmaking in Morocco... The Moroccan Sahara is littered with the legacy of films shot in its dramatic vistas: abandoned sets that reveal the artifice of filmmaking and trigger our recollection of the half-imagined spaces of familiar films from decades past." (Artangel)
Locarno Film Festival 2015 - World premiere

Synopsis

Three mythical stories from the island nation of Vanuatu, South Pacific, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does.

Synopsis

Evoking the still photographs that mysteriously punctuate his feature Two Years at Sea, Ben Rivers' Phantoms of a Libertine is an enigmatic portrait (channeling Marcel Broodthaers as much as Raymond Depardon) of a lost friend told through two sets of photographs-professional and private - and the objects that remain (TIFF 2012).