British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers is internationally renowned for creating a body of bold experimental works that lie between documentary and fiction. Often focusing on subjects that have separated themselves from society, he shapes a world in which the familiar becomes strange. Using vintage cameras, a variety of film stocks and processing the films by hand, the footage often resembles found, aged or archival film which itself feeds the narrative. Breaking the conventional rules of documentary filmmaking, Rivers' films are evocative and sensory, tinged with horror and the unknown, and are an entirely unique personal vision.
This selection of 24 extraordinary films has been specifically curated by the artist.and is the first comprehensive Blu-ray collection of Rivers' award-winning and critically acclaimed films.
This 2-disc Blu-ray Special Edition includes a 32-page booklet with a new essay by author and scholar Erika Balsom and writing on each of the films.
The films:
A World Rattled of Habit (2008)
Ah, Liberty! (2008)
Astika (2006)
The Big Sink (1993)
The Coming Race (2006)
Ghost Strata (2019)
House (2005)
The House was Quiet (2020)
The Hyrcynium Wood (2003)
I Know Where I'm Going (2009)
Ijen/London (2022)
Look Then Below (2019)
Now, at Last! (2019)
Old Dark House (2003)
Origin of the Species (2008)
Phantoms of a Libertine (2012)
Sack Barrow (2011)
The Shape of Things (2016)
Slow Action (2010)
There is a Happy Land Further Awaay (2015)
Things (2014)
This is My Land (2006)
Trees Down Here (2018)
Urth (2016)
We the People (2004)
“Handmade cinema par excellence, by a young British filmmaker who not only shoots his own 16mm footage on a hand-cranked Bolex camera but develops some of it, quite literally, in his kitchen sink. If you believe a film isn't a film without the battalions of technicians it takes to cook up Avengers Assemble, this one may not be for you”
The Independent
“The films of Ben Rivers are rich, cinematic portraits that explore wilderness environments and self-contained worlds”
Picture This
“A unique voice in contemporary moving image practice, Rivers crafts epic narratives out of peripheral people and places. He creates fascinating post apocalyptic visions, colliding slow time geology with the real time of marginalized hinterlands”
Film London Artists' Moving Image Network
Extras
Presented from new digital transfers from original materials, approved by the director.
2-disc Blu-ray incorporating 24 films.
Easter egg.
32-page booklet with a new essay by author and scholar Erika Balsom, and writing on each of the films by Ben Rivers.
