Urthworks: 3 Films by Ben Rivers
Look Then Below, by Ben RIvers
Los Angeles Filmforum and Acropolis Cinema present
Urthworks: 3 Films by Ben Rivers
Sunday September 28th, 2025, 1:00 pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057
Full info: www.lafilmforum.org
In person: Ben Rivers
NOTE THE CHANGE IN TIME
Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
https://link.dice.fm/c3a9fd0d0ce0
Urthworks is a trilogy of films by Ben Rivers imagining the future of a planet at three stages after environmental collapse. Working with 16mm film and digital imaging technology, Rivers captures extraordinary real locations in Japan, Tuvalu, Lanzarote, Arizona, the Mendip Hills, and Somerset as well as fabricated environments. Observational images are interspersed with fantastically costumed characters and uncanny ruins. Through these eerily resonant threads, Rivers forges a compelling blend of document and fiction which presents us with forgotten ideas of the future, stranger-than-fiction images of the present, and elemental visions of the distant future that seem to resemble the deep past. While epic in scope, the narrative that unfolds is shaped around tactile and human detail, suggesting an intimate, sensory account of vast transformations in society and nature.
TRT: 82 min
Slow Action, by Ben RIvers
Slow Action
2010, 16mm to digital, 40 min.
Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Earth in the distant future, when the sea level has risen to absurd heights forming new isolated islands and archipelagos. Two narrators read accounts from a great library of Utopias, describing the four islands seen in the film.
Urth, by Ben Rivers
Urth
2016, 16mm to digital, 20 min.
The last woman on Earth, perhaps. Her logbook accounts her struggles with sustaining her world, sanity and dedication to her unforgiving sealed environment. Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, it forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments, and visions of the future. The film considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today in terms of human kind’s relationship with the natural world. Urth takes its title from the Old Norse word suggesting the twisted threads of fate.
Look Then Below, by Ben Rivers
Look Then Below
2019, 16mm to digital, 22 min.
The film conjures up futuristic beings from an eerie smoke filled landscape and the depths of the earth. Look Then Below was shot in the vast, dark passages of Wookey Hole Caves, under the Mendips in Somerset. The netherworld of chambers, carved out over deep time, once held remnants of lost civilisations, now foretell a future subterranean world, occupied by a species evolved from our environmentally challenged world.