Ben Rivers

  • Ben Rivers – Look Then Below (2019)

    2011-2020Ben RiversDocumentaryExperimentalUnited Kingdom

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    The film conjures up futuristic beings from an eerie smoke-filled landscape and the crystalline depths of the earth. Look Then Below was shot in the vast, dark passages of Wookey Hole Caves, under the Mendips in Somerset. The netherworld of chambers, carved out over deep time, once held remnants of lost civilisations, now foretell a future subterranean world, occupied by a species evolved from our environmentally challenged world.Read More »

  • Ben Rivers – Ah, Liberty! (2008)

    Ben Rivers2001-2010ExperimentalShort FilmUnited Kingdom

    A family’s place in the wilderness, outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape.Read More »

  • Ben Rivers – A Distant Episode (2015)

    2011-2020Ben RiversExperimentalShort FilmUnited Kingdom

    Shot on the otherworldly beaches of Morocco in silvery black-and-white 16mm Scope, Ben Rivers’ A Distant Episode (named for the Paul Bowles short story inventively adapted in Rivers’ feature The Sky Trembles…, also screening in Wavelengths) transforms behind-the-scenes footage into a dreamy film fragment depicting sci-fi incursions into a mythic landscape.Read More »

  • Ben Rivers – Ghost Strata (2019)

    2011-2020Ben RiversDocumentaryExperimentalUnited Kingdom

    Ben Rivers’ films tend to look outward at the larger world. GHOST STRATA is no exception. But to a somewhat different extent, it also looks in. A film diary, it reflects his globetrotting ways, existing in the margins of his otherwise outward-bound filmmaking style. So landscape plays a huge role, and in fact the film takes its title from a geological concept. As a scientist explains in the film, “ghost strata” are theoretical layers of time. When you see the strata of sedimentary rock, you are given to understand that the space around that rock, the very space you occupy, was once filled with earth as well. Rivers composes the film as a calendar, with 12 sections, one for each month of the year of its making. Read More »

  • Ben Rivers & Anocha Suwichakornpong – Krabi, 2562 (2019)

    2011-2020Anocha SuwichakornpongBen RiversDocumentaryThailand

    Krabi, 2562 explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.Read More »

  • Ben Rivers – Now, At Last (2018)

    2011-2020Ben RiversExperimentalShort FilmUnited Kingdom


    Ben Rivers is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in London. His work has been shown in many film festivals and galleries around the world and has won numerous awards. His work ranges from themes about exploring unknown wilderness territories to candid and intimate portrayals of real-life subjects.Read More »

  • Ben Rivers – Trees Down Here (2018)

    2011-2020Ben RiversDocumentaryShort FilmUnited Kingdom

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    To build and create in a way that is open rather than closed: this stated ideal, heard at the beginning, is good for both art and architecture, and holds also for the film itself in its mysterious, associative construction. The images, in their pictorial diversity (black-and-white and colour, sharp and blurry), centre on Churchill College, home to many innovative thinkers since 1960; also seen are a designer’s drawings, owls and snakes, trees and walls. The soundtrack, with rustles, murmurs and clicks, includes words by John Cage and John Ashbery. There’s no story, no schema: only the openness to sensation and connection.Read More »

  • Ben Rivers – There Is a Happy Land Further Awaay (2015)

    2011-2020Ben RiversExperimentalShort FilmUnited Kingdom

    A hesitant female voice reads a poem by Henri Michaux, recounting a life lived in a distant land, full of faltering and mistakes. Island imagery of active volcanoes, underwater WW2 debris, children playing, and wrecked boats transform into intangible digital recollections of the island, made on the opposite side of the world. Images of the eroded land merge with eroding film, a lone figure on a boat drifts at sea.Read More »

  • Ben Rivers – Two Years at Sea (2011)

    USA2011-2020Ben RiversDocumentaryExperimental

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Two Years at Sea (88min, 16mm anamorphic , b/w, blown-up to 35mm, 2011)

    A man called Jake lives in the middle of the forest. He goes for walks in whatever the weather, and takes naps in the misty fields and woods. He builds a raft to spend time sitting in a loch. Drives a beat-up jeep to pick up wood supplies. He is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise.Read More »

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