SLOW ACTION

Anyone who has ever dreamed about running away to the wilderness will feel a pang watching Ben Rivers’s quietly elegiac films. In the past six years the young British artist has trained his camera on abandoned houses, bracken-decked woods, looming mountains and white-haired hermits. The work of Rivers has garnered increasing recognition in the past few years. Rivers’ latest film, Slow Action, is a full-blown futuristic science-fiction epic shot on four “islands” across the globe: holiday favourite Lanzarote; Gunkanjima in Japan; Tuvalu in the Pacific; and a somehow post-apocalyptic Somerset. A canny mix of documentary and staged footage is married to a narration of fantastical encyclopaedia entries on Utopia, illuminating the islanders’ romantic, weird or destructive social codes. (Skye Sherwin)