The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers
classified 12A SPlease note: This was screened in May 2016
Award-winning British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea) returns with this multi-layered look into the construct of cinema itself.
Based on Paul Bowles' brutal 1947 short study A Distant Episode, The Sky Trembles moves between documentary, fiction and fable, seeing its protagonist, filmmaker Oliver Laxe, directing his own film in Morocco (the forthcoming Las Mimosas), before walking off set and into Rivers' chilling narrative, where he is abducted by bandits and froced to dance for the entertainment of his captors.
Shot on 16mm against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the Sahara (with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets). Laxe is drawn into an hallucinatory adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence, as Rivers delves into the different levels of reality created during the filmmaking process itself, and the cultural and physical debris left behind by Western film crews.