Rivers, Ben
Entry updated 14 September 2026. Tagged: Film, People.
(1972- ) UK filmmaker and artist, widely recognized for film and video works exploring places and people far from the centre of industrialized society, and for an innovative use of different film stocks to give his work an attentively tactile quality. Several of his short and medium-length films have sf themes, in particular the Urthworks trilogy in collaboration with US writer Mark von Schlegell (1957- ). The 45-minute Slow Action (2010) depicts a future in which rising sea levels have led to the break-up of continents, leading to the existence of life on Islands and Archipelagos, with a narration of quotes from various Utopian writings. In the 20-minute Urth (2016), filmed inside the Biosphere 2 experimental sealed environment in Arizona, the last human survivor on Earth (see Last Man) writes a diary. The 21-minute Look Then Below (2019) imagines future Evolution in caves and chambers that once held now lost civilizations.
Among his other works, The Coming Race (2006), a five-minute short depicting a horde of people ascending a hill for unknown reasons, is inspired by though not specifically based on The Coming Race (1871; vt Vril: The Power of the Coming Race 1972) by Edward Bulwer Lytton. One of Rivers's infrequent feature-length films, Mare's Nest (2025), partly based on the play The Word for Snow: A Reading (performed 2007; 2014 chap) by Don DeLillo, depicts a young girl moving through a future world seemingly devoid of adults, other than the occasional sage who corresponds to the mysterious professor in the play. [CWa]
Ben Rivers
born Somerset: 1972
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