This Long Century presents Ben River

Director: Ben Rivers

2010 / 71min / DCP

“To celebrate the release of Ben Rivers’s latest feature, Mare’s Nest (2025), This Long Century presents a program of three films by the British artist and filmmaker, a formative figure in experimental cinema whose prolific body of work moves seamlessly between documentary, fiction, and myth. With his mid-length film Slow Action (2010), Rivers imagines a distant future in which rising seas have reduced the Earth to a scattering of isolated islands. Structured as four travelogues, the film draws on narration written together with science-fiction author Mark von Schlegell to conjure fictional utopian societies from real, remote locations, while refusing the familiar violence of post-collapse cinema in favor of something stranger and more mythic. Ah, Liberty! (2008) is a more personal film, rooted in Rivers’s own childhood memories of derelict buildings that served as a playground for him and his friends. This freedom, which feels feral and unstable, is captured here in grainy, hand-processed 16mm black and white, playing out like a half-remembered dream. Finally, Ijen/London (2022) follows a young woman on a quest for a mythical city, finding only a vast toxic swamp of sulphurous flames and chemical smoke. With Herbert Read’s poem “The Autumn of the World” drifting across this devastated landscape, Rivers creates a bleak, beautiful experience that is very hard to shake.” —Series curator Jason Evans, This Long Century

Ijen, London (Ben Rivers, 2022, 7 mins)
Slow Action (Ben Rivers, 2010, 45 mins)
Ah, Liberty! (Ben Rivers, 2008, 19 mins)

Q&A with filmmaker Ben Rivers moderated by This Long Century founder Jason Evans on Friday, June 19th

Part of This Long Century Presents: Ben Rivers