Screening on film!

(Slow Action, 2010, 16mm, 
40 min)

(Sack Barrow, 2011, 16mm, 21 min)

British filmmaker Ben Rivers has made 20 shorts over the past decade: free of narrative, drama and character development, inspired by literature and fine art, and exploring worlds at the far fringe of civilization – places of ragged, strange beauty where inventors, seers and eccentric philosophers live in zealous communion with nature. Tonight’s program features Sack Barrow, which explores a small family-run factory in the outskirts of London. It was set up in 1931 to provide work for limbless and disabled ex-servicemen until the factory finally went into liquidation; the film observes the environment and daily routines of the final month of the six workers. Years of miniature chemical and mineral processes transform the space into another world.

A post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction, Slow Actionapplies 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 short was filmed at different sites across the globe including Lanzarote (a beautiful island full of dead volcanoes and strange architecture), a deserted city off the coast of Japan, and Tuvalu, one of the smallest countries in the world, with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific