Bogancloch

In this follow-up to his 2011 film Two Years at Sea, Ben Rivers returns to the home of Jake Williams. For about 40 years, Williams has been living a quiet and self-sufficient existence at Bogancloch, his farm tucked away in the highlands of Aberdeenshire in Scotland. Completely absorbed by the landscape, he lives a subtly evolving life in a dramatically transformed world.

Rivers and Williams are receptive to those everyday wonders that so often go unnoticed. In mesmerizing black-and-white shots on 16mm and 35mm film (which the director developed himself) we witness the beauty of routine activities over the course of four seasons. The materiality of the celluloid reflects the physicality of the weatherbeaten setting, where all sense of time fades away and a new reality comes to the fore—just beneath the surface of everyday life.

We see Williams teaching in a classroom, using a parasol as part of a visualization of our solar system. Rivers concludes his film by zooming into the cosmos, and this tiny place on Earth suddenly becomes an unimaginably vast expanse.