Ben On Ben: River Rites, or if You're Going To Do It This Might Be The Best Way

Ben Rivers & Ben Russell

“In which Ben Rivers (that’s me writing about myself in the third person) tries to compile a programme of films based around what he thinks might be going on in his friend Ben Russell’s film River Rites. We have talked for years now about what it means to film people, how to not be on the outside but on the inside, though sometimes you have to stay on the outside in order to see clearly. What happens when you bring a camera into a place, and you knowingly place it facing in one direction instead of another, and you record images on film for ten minutes at a time, unbroken stretches of film that become trance. About lives lived alongside others, at work and play on the same piece of land or in the same stretch of river. About movie-magic – transformation tricks we play in order to find some other truth to the material, a world that exists in cinema and nowhere else. This programme points to some possible answers as to how we can make films with and about people.”