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.
Film details
- Country of production
- UK
- Year
- 2015
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2016
- Length
- 96"
- Medium/Format
- 35mm
You may also like this
-
A glória de fazer cinema em Portugal
Short documentary unravels what happened to Portuguese writer José Régio’s intention 90 years ago to borrow a camera and make a film and in t
-
I’ll Be Late for Dinner
A rhythmic montage of photographs made by the Cassini satellite in orbit around Saturn, including the ‘imperfect’ images that never made it into th
-
Wake (Subic)
Wake (Subic) forms, together with Vapor Trail (IFFR 2010), a monumental essay that investigates the context of the poisoning around former American