Ben Rivers

Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction.

A family's place in the wilderness, outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format, but is undercut with a sense of foreboding. There's no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived, rituals performed. (imdb)

A delicate and witty portrait of Jake, an outsider who lives in the wilderness of his own creation. (bfi.org.uk)

Charting the beginnings of the time, through the descent of man, on to an uncertain future - all shot throughout the seasons in the garden of S, who lives in the wilderness and builds contraptions. (anonymous)

From pagan re-enactors to failed communes, black metal festivals to Arctic hermits, and the forever Golden Hour to the Northern Lights, A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS is an inquiry into the possibilities of a spiritual existence within an increasingly secular Western culture. A participatory ethnography in the best possible sense, A SPELL choreographs the actions of non-actors within existing Scandinavian landscapes in an effort to arrive at a hybrid document of the past, present, and future. (Ben Rivers and Ben Russell)

"What would be left of human action, human traces, human constructions, human buildings and wider ripple effects of humans after that length of time...assuming, that humans disappear in the geologically near future." A fragmented road trip through Britain on the peripheries. Down empty roads, off in the wilderness, a few lone stragglers. My first stop geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, talking about the Earth in One-hundred millions years time.

Three mythical stories from the Republic of Vanuatu, an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does. (benrivers.com)

Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence... (ifistanbul.com)

A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments. (imdb)

A person is heard fleeing an angry mob - yet the uncannily empty streets show no sign of the chase. A never-ending nightmare. Sound reveals the hidden history in an imagined place. (vimeo)

In 'Things', Ben Rivers embarks on a reverse expedition and turns the camera on his own home. The film unfolds as a local chronology, where Rivers's small London apartment of rooms, objects and archival accumulations of photographs and film strips are examined like a trip into the director's private space. (imdb)

In this short film of Cowan Court, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work. (imdb)

Exploring the landscape and stories within the community, Krabi, 2562 captures the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the recent past and the contemporary world collide. (festivalscope)

Experimental docufiction described as "a playful take on what seems like a serious documentary on structuralist philosophy." It appears to document a three-day forum attended by intellectuals and artists gathered to imagine and discuss the possibilities of Résistances, an unrealised sequel to Jean-François Lyotard's 1985 exhibition titled Les Immatériaux, shadowed by a man dressed in a green lycra full bodysuit allowing him to act as a human greenscreen displaying images by artist Peter Burr.

In Now, At Last!, Ben Rivers investigates what it's like to live in slow-motion by capturing a day in the life of a sloth. When slowness is a way of living, every daily action, even the most mundane one, becomes amplified, strangely dramatic, and almost monumental—including taking a nap.

Filmed in various places over the globe, charting various personal movements of the filmmaker, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity's presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future.

The Vanuatu archipelago located west of Fiji was devastated at the beginning of last year by Cyclone Pam. With his accustomed talent for revealing the internal magic of a place, Ben Rivers offers up a memoir of an obliterated village. In his poetic and near ethnographic approach he contemplates a distant world in which the fleeting lives of the locals come up against the perpetuity of capricious elements. The effect is enhanced by recited verse from Belgian poet and traveler Henri Michau (IMDb).

Futuristic beings are conjured from an eerie smoke-filled landscape and the depths of the earth. This setting foretells a future subterranean world occupied by a species evolved from our environmentally challenged world. (imdb)

Bogancloch is where Jake Williams lives, nestled in a vast highland forest of Scotland. The film portrays his life throughout the seasons, with other people occasionally crossing into his otherwise solitary life. At the heart a song, an argument between life and death, each stating their case to rule over the world. The film is without exposition, it aims at something less recognisable, a different existence of reality observed in discrete moments.