Ben Rivers

Bogancloch

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. A sequel to Two Years at Sea (2011), charting a subtly changing life in a radically changing world.

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.

I First Saw the Light

I First Saw the Light channels the vestige of Joseph Carey Merrick’s surviving output. Better known as The Elephant Man, he produced a little noticed two-page autobiography, sold to those attending a freak show in which he was displayed, opposite the royal London hospital in London's Whitechapel High Street. There is one surviving copy of the pamphlet. Its text is coupled with starkly filmed sequences of a model church he also constructed, now hermetically sealed within a glass and ebony container, together forming the basis for this poignant, silent film. A reminder of Merrick’s profound humanity in the face of extreme adversity, it also serves as an auto-biographical footnote and reminder of David Lynch’s eponymous feature film on Merrick, in which the model is a central motif and metaphor for his psychological and emotional fluctuations.

The Bomb with a Man in His Shoe

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

The Big Sink

"My first film, shot at art school on a crappy Super 8 camera I bought from the market. At the time I was obsessed with Universal Studios horror films, and Dreyer’s Vampyr, and I had just discovered three films by George Kuchar, and Alain Resnais. So it’s a mix of those, sort of. It was shot over many months, as I had to coerce my friends to give me their time, especially the lead, who required many hours of make-up before he killed my friends. It’s a play on Jekyll and Hyde, though how clear this is to the viewer I’m pretty uncertain.” - Ben Rivers