BOGANCLOCH
Great Britain, Germany, Iceland| 2024 | 78 min | bw/col.
Bogancloch is the name of the forest that surrounds Jake Williams’ home, a remote shelter nestled in the Scottish highlands. The man, a modern solitary mystic, lives in harmony with the rhythms of nature and the cycle of the seasons. The pace of his days is given by minimal events, reiterated gestures that take on a new consistency again and again. The British filmmaker revisited the hermit at the center of his 2006 short This Is My Land and the 2011 feature-length documentary Two Years at Sea (2011), taking the intimacy of this cinematic relationship to a further level and prompting the viewer to imagine the man’s inner life while he takes a nap under the shadow of a tree or observes the landscape in the distance from the window. Through an oblique, only partly documentary, narration, and the typical poetic and hyper-realistic approach that characterizes Ben Rivers’ filmography, a dreamlike hypothesis of an earthly utopia in black and white takes shape, broken by rare bursts of colour and brief musical instants. (a.s.)