Movies: Ben Russell

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 ...

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....

A documentary portrait of Utopia, loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel....

A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial legacy of a post-postcolonial present....

“I could do wonders if I didn't have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.” -- Ponce de Léon Our PONCE DE LEÓN discovered the fountain of youth and drank of immortality in the waning moments of his life. In an instant, he beca...

Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving hist...

"La Montagne Invisible" is an installation conceived as a journey into the infinite : an immersive multi-channel AV installation that transforms the material of a Finnish wanderer's secular pilgrimage towards a utopian summit into an infinite video l...

Direct Action documents the everyday of one of the most important activist communities in France in order to see how the success of a radical protest movement can offer a path through the climate crisis facing us all....

“Filmed in the remains of Soweto’s historic Sans Souci Cinema (1948-1998), YOLO is a makeshift structuralist mash-up created in collaboration with the Eat My Dust youth collective from the Kliptown district of Soweto, South Africa. Vibrating with mic...

A giant pot is ascending from the sky. Twenty winsome damsels are landing on planet earth, coming out of the pot filled with two-hundred and eighty pounds of spaghetti. A battle for sauce and survival ensues....

An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the ritualized actions of the Red and the Blue Gods....

A Jim Drain film...

This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. A 74-minute experimental narrative film that turns the ...

Shot in a creaky, wooden-floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of “Resistance”, the film initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-t...

A transfixing performance film in which artist Basma Alsharif shoots footage in Athens, Malta and the "post-civilization" of the Gaza Strip while under self-hypnosis....

for the installation: Renée’s Room...

“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, B...

The film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, in a rehearsal of the voyage undertaken by their...

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, coloni...

A speculative portrait of a Dutchman living in the Surinamese jungle - fixing canoe motors, accused of eating the locals' children....