Country: USA, Malta
Year: 2014
Duration: 24'
Loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel, Atlantis is a documentary portrait of Utopia – an island that has never/forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet. Herein is folk song and pagan rite, religious march and reflected temple, the sea that surrounds us all. Even as we are slowly sinking, we are happy and content.
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).
Declaration
film director
“Atlantis figured into my imagination long before I could ever pick Malta out on a map; it rematerialized once I was given the chance to spend four weeks there, once I learned that Atlantis was oft-confused for Malta (and vice versa). Instead of arguing for or against this confusion, I accepted it as fact and decided to make a portrait of a place that otherwise only exists as myth.”
