Wendy Ide 

The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers review – savage beauty

Ben Rivers’s hallucinatory arthouse film demands a lot of viewer investment for its rewards
  
  

The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers film still
‘Hallucinatory’: The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers. Photograph: PR

This experimental work from British artist and film-maker Ben Rivers belongs at the most arcane reaches of the arthouse spectrum. Created as part of an installation, it’s a piece which would sit just as comfortably in a gallery as it does in a cinema. Rivers blends documentary and fiction – the first 40 minutes is an account of film-maker Oliver Laxe shooting a feature in the High Atlas mountains in Morocco, before Laxe becomes the protagonist of Rivers’s own hallucinatory narrative. There is a savage beauty to this work, which is very loosely based on a short story by Paul Bowles, but it is a demanding, difficult viewing experience.

Watch the trailer for The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.
 

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