Country: USA
Year: 2012
Duration: 26'
“I could do wonders if I didn’t have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.” (Ponce de León)
Biography
film director
Ben Russell
Ben Russell (USA, 1976) is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker. His films and performances have been presented in several museums and festivals, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Festival, and the Venice Festival. The series Recent Anthropologies (2000-2009) was presented to the Torino Film Festival along with the documentary Let Each One Go Where He May, his debut into feature films, which won the Cult Award. In 2012 he presented at the Festival Ponce de Léon, directed with Jim Drain, and the following year he won with Ben Rivers the Internazionale.Doc section with A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. In 2017 he presented in Locarno competiton the documentary feature Good L
FILMOGRAFIA
Six Army Shorts (cm, 1997), Daumë (cm, 2000), Black and White Trypps Number One (cm, 2005), Black and White Trypps Number Two (cm, 2006), Black and White Trypps Number Three (cm, 2007), Black and White Trypps Number Four (cm, 2008), Trypps #5 (Dubai) (cm, 2008), Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) (cm, 2008), The Black and the White Gods (cm, 2008), Trypps #6 (Malobi) (cm, 2009), Let Each One Go Where He May (doc., 2009), Good Luck (doc., 2018), The Rare Event (mm, 2018).
Jim Drain
Jim Drain (Cleveland, OH, USA) has worked in various artistic ambits, such as music, cartoon-strips and painting, besides video and performance. He is the creator of anthropomorphic sculptures and artistically elaborate pullovers, he which combine textile and painting.
FILMOGRAFIA
Ben Russell, Jim Drain:
Ponce de León (cm, 2012).
Declaration
film director
“As the legend would have it, Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León arrived in Florida in 1513 in search of the fountain of youth. In the world presented here, he has found it: 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 eighty-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 Miami highrises 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 León, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself.”
Cast
& Credits
regia/directors
Ben Russell, Jim Drain
