Ben Rivers

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.

A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.

After an abortion, a woman roams the streets, engaging in a sequence of understated encounters bathed in the glow of neon lights.

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.

Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.

The third in the series of experimental "horror" features, this collection features the shorts The Psychotic Odyssey of Richard Chase (1999) by Cary Burtt, J.X. Williams' Satan Claus (1975), Jason Bognacki's Loma Lynda: The Red Door (2008), Terror! (2007) by Ben Rivers, Mike Kuchar's Born of the Wind (1961), and a collaboration from Guy Maddin and Marie Losier called Manuelle Labor (2007). While not featured in the program, an extra includes the short It Gets Worse (2008) by Clifton Childree.

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. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

Inspired by the themes of Knut Hamsun’s ‘Pan’, Ben Rivers ventures deep into the remote forests of Aberdeenshire to document the routine of Jake Williams - a man seen in all seasons, living reclusively, surviving frugally, and passing the time with strange projects.

Reframing our current political moment in intimate terms, Gibson’s urgent snapshot of worldwide social calamities doubles as a document of practical resistance. In Gibson’s hands, the music of Pauline Oliveros and the words of poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles imbue images of street riots, the Grenfell Fire, and the mass refugee migration with complexity and grace.

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Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

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.

A collaboration between filmmaker Ben Rivers and sculptor Céline Condorelli, with contributions by writer and artist Jay Bernard, After Work blurs boundaries between labour and leisure using nimble essayistic encounters that are as suggestive as they are concrete.

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.

Ben Rivers' films study the otherworldly, looking for places and stories outside the daily conventions of reality. Look Then Below was filmed in a Somerset 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.

A film by Ben Rivers

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, 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.

A mystery that began as a document of abandoned farms in South East England.