Mare's Nest

The great Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet telling two stories to Shakib.

Inspired by Richard Jefferies’ late 19th-century ‘After London’ - one of the earliest post-apocalyptic novels - the film serves as test footage for how a future London might look. How a city that no longer exists might appear, having disappeared. Instead, in its place a vast toxic swamp, spewing ocherous smoke and chemical waste, with electric blue sulphurous flames emerging from the dead land. Shot on location in and amongst the craters and sulphur mines of the Ijen volcano complex in Indonesia, the imagery is accompanied by a recording of Herbert Read reciting his poem ‘The Autumn of the World’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

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.

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.

The last woman on Earth: Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, Urth forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments and visions of the future. The film considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today and in the near future, in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

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.

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.

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.

Six women in Paris traverse the anxiety of the city after dark. A filmmaker struggles to understand the film she is making. A Black single mother refuses the categories imposed on her. A former sex worker reflects on her past. A poet gives up trying for a child. Taking place over a single night, the film intertwines dream, fiction, and reality, liquefying one into the other.

“The wind, one brilliant day, called to my soul with an odor of jasmine.” Last autumn, actress Tang Wei softly recited these lines in English while sitting beside director Ben Rivers on a fallen tree trunk in the outskirts of London. Together, they carefully searched for the poem's rhythm, as the wind rustled through the trees.