Co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum*
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.
Copies of the visual novel Urthworks (Mack, 2025) will be available to purchase at the screening.
About the program:
Slow Action (Dir. Ben Rivers, 2010, 16mm to digital, 40 min)
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 (Dir. Ben Rivers, 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 (Dir. Ben Rivers, 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.
TRT: 82 min
In person: Ben Rivers
*Filmforum members can reserve free tickets here.
"[A] masterpiece... Slow Action is a mysterious elegy of a future not yet here which also feels and looks already decayed and collapsed." —Robert Koehler, Cinema Scope
"A remarkable piece of work — hypnotic and strange. Look Then Below gives the unique impression of being an actual alien artifact." —Daniel Gorman, InReviewOnline
"Rich with subtle literary, cultural, and artistic allusions. Urth is a chilling portent of a future devastated by climate change and miserable with human solitude." —The Chicago Reader
"For Rivers, to make a film is by definition to create a world, perhaps to imagine another one — a drive that parallels the utopian aspirations of many of his subjects." —Dennis Lim, The New York Times
"A dialectic between mythical history and quirky speculative scenarios drives all three of Rivers’s [Urthworks] films, which play one after the other like a carousel designed by Gramsci and Peter Pan: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, and some other crazy stuff. " —Timotheus Vermeulen, Artforum
(Available to download after screening date)