The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers

In his latest cinematic effort, one of the most prolific experimental film directors working today continues to embrace his original vision of the world, his feeling for subtle humor, for the vastness of the human mind, for absurdity, and for the randomness that life brings. This multilayered, genre-defying picture exists at the meeting point of documentary, fiction, and fable. At its center is an adaptation of a short story by American writer Paul Bowles, which takes us to Morocco, where movie director Oliver Laxe is making Mimosas, but later we find ourselves in Ben Rivers’ own story. In the Atlas Mountains and the endless, surreal Sahara, director Laxe begins to lose himself, not only in the ever-encroaching sand but also in hallucinations emanating from the rawness and visceral cruelty of the local landscape and its inhabitants. What is reality and what cinematic illusion? Do they even exist? As we have come to expect from Rivers, here, too, viewers, as co-creators of the film, will find the answers themselves. And the adventure is thereby all the greater.