Ben Rivers has been bobbing around the international film festival circuit for several years gaining international acclaim for his short experimental films, and is widely lauded as a new British filmmaking talent with a gloriously askew aesthetic.
Several recent films have seen him concentrating on rural settings documenting people living beyond the fringes of society. One such man, Jake Williams, who starred in beautiful short film This Is My Land, is the subject of Two Years at Sea, Rivers’ debut feature-length artful-documentary.
Echoing Williams’ self-sustaining and deeply analogue life in the wilds of Scotland, Rivers’ employs his well-honed techniques of hand-processing 16mm, creating a portrait of a man and a way of life that turns minutiae into a symphony of (often absurd) pleasures and crackles with all the idiosyncrasies of the medium. Jake is a magnetic and intriguing presence, and the film could act as a gateway for cinemas wishing to dip their toes in the warm waters of screening artists’ moving image.