Ben Russell

The film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, in a rehearsal of the voyage undertaken by their ancestors, who escaped from slavery at the hands of the Dutch 300 years prior.A path still traveled to this day, its changing topography bespeaks a diverse history of forced migration. (imdb)

The transformation of a rock audience's collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order. (imdb)

Trance dance and water implosion, a line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Shot in a single-take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of an animist are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps, embodiment is our eternal everything. (Venice Film Festival)

A young woman's LSD trip becomes a portal into a psychedelic rendering of the desert landscape that transcends all rational sense of space and perspective. (wexarts.org)

From pagan re-enactors to failed communes, black metal festivals to Arctic hermits, and the forever Golden Hour to the Northern Lights, A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS is an inquiry into the possibilities of a spiritual existence within an increasingly secular Western culture. A participatory ethnography in the best possible sense, A SPELL choreographs the actions of non-actors within existing Scandinavian landscapes in an effort to arrive at a hybrid document of the past, present, and future. (Ben Rivers and Ben Russell)

The mystery of Atlantis is always alive. In this movie is a presentation of the Ancient Sings and Teachings of Atlantis according to ancient scripts. This movie is a presentation of these Ancient Sings and Teachings about Atlantis. This move has got a Diploma from the International Festival of Nation 2008. (imdb)

Filmed between a state-owned large-scale underground mine in the war-torn state of Serbia and an illegal mining collective in the tropical heat of Suriname, Good Luck is a visceral documentary portrait of hope and sacrifice in a time of global economic turmoil. (kinoelektron.com)

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation's sixteenth president.

A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread.

From the outskirts of Vegas to the desert ghost towns of Chile, a pinhole travelogue for the world's end, for what was left behind.

From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic.

On the sides of the quarry, hundreds of giant statues lay strewn about in various states of disrepair. We sat there, at the base of the thing, for hours our jaws open wide.

Characters come and go as if they're 'primitives' posing for the camera, either obeying or fighting an ethnographer's controlling eye.

"Workers Leaving the Factory" was one of the films screened by the Lumiere Brothers during the first public performance of Cinématograph - Russell resorted back to the source of the film and paraphrased it in a desert city flourishing thanks to oil incomes; however, his workers are not walking, they are merely waiting. (imdb)

Experimental docufiction described as "a playful take on what seems like a serious documentary on structuralist philosophy." It appears to document a three-day forum attended by intellectuals and artists gathered to imagine and discuss the possibilities of Résistances, an unrealised sequel to Jean-François Lyotard's 1985 exhibition titled Les Immatériaux, shadowed by a man dressed in a green lycra full bodysuit allowing him to act as a human greenscreen displaying images by artist Peter Burr.

"I could do wonders if I didn't have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me." – Ponce de Léon

“A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap. These simple elements create a hurried maze of twisting antler branches, twigs, and dissected slices of pure “space.” I can hear the crackling fires, echoing elk calls and frosty despair…” - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition

A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces - of grafitti’d marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls - hand-processed in red, green, and blue.

Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the Ancestors documents the dream lives of the territory’s inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve and expand.

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.