Ben Russell Movies

An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the...

An experimental ethnography recorded in the jungle village of Bendekondre, Suriname at the start of 2007. Composed of community-generated...

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...

for the installation: Renée’s Room

A Jim Drain film

It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering...

Shot in a creaky, wooden-floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold...

The film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through...

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

A visceral non-fiction portrait of hope and sacrifice in a time of global economic turmoil, filmed between a large-scale underground mine in post-war...

'Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the...

"A night sky fills with light shimmers and flecks, surface markings, heavenly bodies. It’s an ocean, a well, a screen, a mirror, a portal....

the quarry is a silent document of five minutes in the presence of the sublime. This small, quiet 16mm film serves as a testament both to...

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are...

"TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a...

Where have you been? I have been waiting for you. Let us begin. The Tawny Frogmouth is not an owl. Here is its actual call: hrr hrrrm hrr hrrrm hrr...

From the south of France, a science fiction film about the end of the Leisure Class and that which came to replace it.

From mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin, a 16mm portrait of an increasingly chaotic present, one whose political contours are affected by...

Perspective and permanence inform Ben Russell’s playful La Prospettiva (1653), filmed in the Colonnade at the Palazzo Spada in Rome, capturing...

Featuring a soundtrack melted out of a Cyndi Lauper CD, here is an(other) attempt to find a way through the everywhere fog of 2020. Filmed between...