Bogancloch, by Ben Rivers, Los Angeles Premiere

Los Angeles Filmforum and Acropolis Cinema present

Bogancloch, by Ben Rivers, Los Angeles Premiere!

Sunday September 30th, 2025, 8:00 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

Full info: www.lafilmforum.org

In person: Ben Rivers

Tickets: $15 general, free for Filmforum members: https://link.dice.fm/q1c820beef1c

“Like the best cinema––or, at least, the kind I respond to most passionately––the films of Ben Rivers immerse us in stories that aren’t as interested in solving enigmas as letting us luxuriate in them. To say that very little happens in Bogancloch––a follow-up to the director’s 2011 feature debut, Two Years at Sea––is both technically correct and frustratingly reductive. For a little less than 90 minutes, Rivers’s latest tracks an old man as he go about a life of self-subsistence in the middle of the woods––all we do is watch him bathe, cook, hike, hunt, and sleep. 

“His name is Jake Williams, a Scottish musician who’s lived in this remote corner of Aberdeenshire for decades, and whom Rivers had already immortalized in his 2007 short This Is My Land and then again in Two Years at Sea. You do not need to have watched either to follow the action here––not because Bogancloch has none, but because fact-telling just isn’t the type of exercise Rivers is concerned with. Bogancloch is so parsimonious with contextual information as to accrue an almost universal, timeless quality. Jake’s name is never uttered, nor is his rustic house’s, which lends the film its title. Were it not for a campfire singalong to an old Scots ballad by Hamish Henderson, “The Flyting o’ Life and Daith,” you wouldn’t even be able to tell where in the world this secluded woodland was. 

“That’s because Bogancloch does away with all the most basic demands of conventional storytelling; it invites contemplation rather than comprehension. Rivers’s goal isn’t to satisfy your curiosity so much as stoke it, and in a time when films that refuse to spoon-feed information to their viewers or connect the dots for them have come to be regarded as irredeemably pretentious, there’s something almost subversive about his approach. Jake is a hermit, and his existence remains fittingly hermetic. We leave this pastoral portrait with no idea as to who he really is, who he was, what on earth led him to abandon civilization and seek refuge in a cottage shrouded in ivy and pine trees. Which isn’t to suggest the film tells us nothing whatsoever about him, only that the few clues we’re handed out do not fit neatly together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; every little secret or backstory Rivers gestures at unfurls another, like the petals of a flower.” - Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage, https://thefilmstage.com/locarno-review-ben-rivers-entrancing-bogancloch-invites-contemplation-and-defies-comprehension/

Ben Rivers’s films tread a line between documentary and fiction, often following people who have in some way separated themselves from mainstream society, creating oblique narratives imagining alternative existences. Awards include the EYE Art Film Prize; FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film Two Years At Sea; Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel; and most recently the Pardo Verde for Mare’s Nest at Locarno Film Festival.  His films include:

BOGANCLOCH (86 min, 2024)

GHOST STRATA (46 min, 2019)

NOW, AT LAST! (39 min, 2019)

KRABI, 2562 (96 min, co-directed with Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2019)

THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS (96 min, 2015)

WHAT MEANS SOMETHING (66 min, 2015)

A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (96 min, co-directed with Ben Russell, 2013)

TWO YEARS AT SEA (88 min, 2011)

SLOW ACTION (45 min, 2010)