Ben Rivers

FSC-Radcliffe Fellow 2014-15, 2015-16

Ben Rivers is an experimental filmmaker and artist based in London. His work ranges from themes about exploring unknown wilderness territories to candid and intimate portrayals of real-life subjects. At Radcliffe, Rivers will be working on an ethnographic film, The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.

Rivers, who earned a bachelor’s in fine arts from Falmouth School of Art, has been the recipient of a number of commissions and awards, including the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at the 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature, Two Years at Sea; the inaugural Robert Gardner Film Award from Studio7Arts in 2013; a 2011 Baloise Art Prize at the Art Basel 42 for Sack Barrow; and a 2010 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in the visual arts.

FSC Works

Mohammed Mrabet

Ben Rivers, 20 min. (2015)

Mohammed Mrabet, storyteller and artist, tells a story of meeting Jane Bowles, which then moves into two more stories.

The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers

Ben Rivers, 96 min. (2015)

THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS is a labyrinthine film that moves between documentary, fiction and fable. Shooting against the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the Moroccan Sahara, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his film set descending into a hallucinatory, fever dream of madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.

A Distant Episode

Ben Rivers, 18 min. (2015)

A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind-the-scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film of a hazy silvery vision of the world, dug up in a distant future.