Year: 2015
Duration: 18'
Filmed on the beaches of Morocco, A Distant Episode – whose title is from a short story by Paul Bowles which Rivers adapted in the feature-length The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers – transforms the backstage of the shooting of a movie into a dreamlike fragment which blends elements of science fiction and an anthropological gaze.
Biography
film director
Ben Rivers
Ben Rivers studied fine arts at the Falmouth School of Art, initially focusing on sculpture and later shifting his interest to photography and film production, with a special eye on documentaries and their contamination with fiction. In 1996, he was one of the founders of the Brighton Cinemateque. He received numerous international awards, including the FIPRESCI Award at the 2011 Venice Film Festival for his first feature film, Two Years at Sea, and Best Documentary at the 2013 Torino Film Festival for A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, which he directed with Ben Russell. He made his comeback in Torino in 2015 with the short A Distant Episode (2015).
FILMOGRAFIA
This Is My Land (cm, 2006), The Coming Race (cm, 2006), Ah, Liberty! (cm, 2008), I Know Where I’m Going (cm, 2009), Slow Action (cm, 2010), Two Years at Sea (2011), Phantoms of a Libertine (cm, 2012), A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (coregia/codirector Ben Russell, 2013), Things (cm, doc., 2014), The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015), A Distant Episode (cm, 2015).
Gabriel Abrantes, Ben Rivers:
The Hunchback (cm, 2016).
The Hunchback (cm, 2016).
Declaration
film director
“Initially, I thought the movie by the artist Shezad Dawood Towards the Possible would be a prologue to The Sky Trembles and I wanted to involve the Moroccan narrator Mohammed Mrabet in the project as well. There are short clips of him sitting next to Shakib, who in turn starred in the film by Oliver Laxe, whose shots can be seen in the first part of The Sky Trembles. […] I tried to bring all these things together during editing but it didn’t work… But I knew that I would make an installation and that it would be much more fragmentary, an exploded version of the entire project. So, yes, there is a backstage to Shezad’s film, which I obscurely called A Distant Episode, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with A Distant Episode.”
Cast
& Credits
regia/director
Ben Rivers
produttore/producer
Jacqui Davies
produzione/production
Artangel
contatti/contacts
Lux
distribution@lux.org.uk
www.lux.org.uk
Ben Rivers
produttore/producer
Jacqui Davies
produzione/production
Artangel
contatti/contacts
Lux
distribution@lux.org.uk
www.lux.org.uk
