Swedenborg House is pleased to announce a screening of Ben Rivers’s The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (96 mins, 2015), as part of the programme to accompany Simon Moretti’s exhibition Hereafter. The evening will feature a screening with director Ben Rivers introducing the film. 

About the film

THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS is a labyrinthine and epic film that moves between documentary, fiction and fable. Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the Moroccan Sahara, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his film set descending into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. But what is the reality of this? A multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself. (From benrivers.com)

Bio

BEN RIVERS is a filmmaker who lives and works in London. Rivers’s films are typically intimate portrayals of solitary beings or isolated communities; his practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction. Rivers uses these themes as a starting point from which to imagine alternative narratives and existences in marginal worlds. Recent exhibitions include After London, Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2022); Urthworks, Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Norway (2021) and Hestercombe House, Somerset, UK (2020); Now, at Last!, Kate MacGarry Gallery, London, UK (2019); Urth, Renaissance Society, Chicago, USA (2016); Islands, Hamburg Kunstverein, Germany (2016); Earth Needs More Magicians, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2015); and Fable, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2014). Ben’s feature-length films include Two Years at Sea (2011); A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013) with Ben Russell; Krabi 2562 (2019) with Anocha Suwichakornpong; and Bogancloch (2024). Ben was guest judge at the Swedenborg Film Festival 2023.

Simon Moretti, Double Vortex (after Emanuel Swedenborg), 2025. Neon, cables, transformer, 79 x 57 cm. Photo: Nick Malyon. Courtesy of the artist.