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Rating: 6 stars

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black and white nature experimental costa rica mubi jungle

All movies seen on 11/24/2020

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Now, at Last! (2018)

Directed by Ben Rivers

Documentary | Experimental | Short

Overview

A film of a sloth, using three-colour separation to show sloth time.

Rated NR | Length 38 minutes

Viewing History (seen 1 time)

Viewing Notes

This is a 30+ minute short film of a sloth sleeping!! tbh it’s kinda what I needed tonight. The long periods of black & white photography are separated by a burst of color distortion with Unchained Melody playing. It’s wild and I like it.

I didn’t read the synopsis or the MUBI take beforehand but I found myself doing exactly as they described; relishing even the tiniest movement of this beautiful creature. The sloth really seems otherworldly and a fascinating animal. I wished that I could go to a place where you could just sit in the jungle and watch these wonderful things just hang from tree limbs.

This is a snippet of what Director Ben Rivers had to say about this film:

“I wanted to make a film where you are simply asked to look at this creature which has a different relationship with time, to lose yourself in its rhythm and relinquish the anthropocentric view of the world, just for a short while, and to let go and not be angry about there not being a story about a sloth going to find a mate or whatever. It is partly inspired by a couple of stories, though: The Word For World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is about capitalist humans colonizing a forest planet without caring about how everything is connected as an ecosystem; and Axolotl by Julio Cortazar, which is about someone who repeatedly goes to an aquarium to stare into the eyes of an axolotl, and at the end a transference takes place. The film is essentially saying that the world isn’t us and everything else, the world is everything including us.”

This entire interview is very good. I’d like to see more of his work.
http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/sculpting-in-time-ben-rivers-on-ghost-strata-and-now-at-last

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