Ben Russell

Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.

Direct Action documents the everyday of one of the most important activist communities in France in order to see how the success of a radical protest movement can offer a path through the climate crisis facing us all.

This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. A 74-minute experimental narrative film that turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak, Ouroboros asks what it means to be human when humanity has failed. Taking the form of a love story, the film's central character is Diego Marcon, a man who embarks on a circular journey to shed his pain only to experience it, again and again. In the course of a single day, his travel fuses together Native American territories, the ancient Italian city of Matera, a castle in Brittany, and the ruins of the Gaza Strip into a single landscape.

“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas

Trance dance and water implosion, a line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Shot in a single-take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of an animist are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps, embodiment is our eternal everything.

A giant pot is ascending from the sky. Twenty winsome damsels are landing on planet earth, coming out of the pot filled with two-hundred and eighty pounds of spaghetti. A battle for sauce and survival ensues.

A documentary portrait of Utopia, loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel.

“I could do wonders if I didn't have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.” -- Ponce de Léon Our PONCE DE LEÓN discovered the fountain of youth and drank of immortality in the waning moments of his life. In an instant, he became old forever – an 80-year old Spaniard who would continue to walk the earth for century after century after century, watching as coral foundations gave way to mangrove swamps, as swamps were drained and buildings were erected, as buildings decayed and swamps returned. Our PONCE DE LEÓN is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma – it is a constant, a given, and his personal battle lies in trying to either arrest time entirely or to make the hands on his clock move ever faster. For Ponce de Léon, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself.

Short film from 2007.

A transfixing performance film in which artist Basma Alsharif shoots footage in Athens, Malta and the "post-civilization" of the Gaza Strip while under self-hypnosis.

A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial legacy of a post-postcolonial present.

"La Montagne Invisible" is an installation conceived as a journey into the infinite : an immersive multi-channel AV installation that transforms the material of a Finnish wanderer's secular pilgrimage towards a utopian summit into an infinite video labyrinth of beginnings, endings and disjunctive in-betweens.

An experimental ethnography recorded in the jungle village of Bendekondre, Suriname at the start of 2007. Composed of community-generated performances, re-enactments and extemporaneous recordings, this film functions doubly as an examination of a rapidly changing material culture in the present and as a historical document for the future. Whether the resultant record is directed towards its subjects, its temporary residents (filmmakers), or its Western viewers is a question proposed via the combination of long takes, materialist approaches, selective subtitling, and a focus on various forms of cultural labor.

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

In the blue-green light of the tropical rainforest, among the creeks and boulders and fallen trees, humankind's closest relatives drift in and out of meditative states. Also features a hippo and a tapir.

A Jim Drain film

Through softly textured 16mm photography and regional iconography, Silva offers a modernist reflection on two of upstate New York’s most storied 19th century touchstones—the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the legend of Rip Van Winkle—nodding to a few musical heroes along the way.

A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces - of grafitti'd marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls - hand-processed in red, green, and blue.

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.

for the installation: Renée’s Room