Ben Russell Movies

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await...

Direct Action documents the everyday of one of the most important activist communities in France in order to see how the success of a radical protest...

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured...

The film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through...

In the blue-green light of the tropical rainforest, among the creeks and boulders and fallen trees, humankind's closest relatives drift in and out of...

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is...

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of...

'Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the...

A transfixing performance film in which artist Basma Alsharif shoots footage in Athens, Malta and the "post-civilization" of the Gaza Strip while...

A documentary portrait of Utopia, loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-resurrection via...

“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its...

“I could do wonders if I didn't have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.” -- Ponce de Léon Our PONCE DE...

A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial...

the quarry is a silent document of five minutes in the presence of the sublime. This small, quiet 16mm film serves as a testament both to...

Trance dance and water implosion, a line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Shot in a single-take at a sacred site on the...

"TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a...

"Against Time" is a visual journey, continuing Ben Russell’s investigations into the perception of time and how we listen to music.

An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the...

A short treatise on the semiotics of capital, happiness, and phenomenology under the flickering neon of global capitalism.