The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers

“Can all people who aren’t acting leave?” The hardships of being a director are tangible in the latest Ben Rivers film, which is just as mysterious as its title (a reference to a work by Paul Bowles). Rivers was present in Morocco’s Atlas mountains on the sets of Oliver Laxe’s Herzog-inspired production Las Mimosas, and there he primarily documented frustration, hiatus and inertia.
It is only when Laxe doesn’t see the point of filming any more (beware: we are slowly moving into fictional territory) that The Sky Trembles… becomes more than a film in a film and a film about film. Rivers then puts Laxe through a new agony, based on Bowles’ short story A Distant Episode. The Spanish director is kidnapped by a group of nomads who sell him to a different tribe as a gleaming, dancing object. It is an unthinkable action that reflects as much on the difficult relationship between man, nature and film as on the previous difficult scenes behind the scenes.

• 

• 

•