Bogancloch. 2024. UK/Germany/Iceland. Directed by Ben Rivers. US premiere. 86 min.
Like some long-lost calotype of the pioneering 19th-century Scottish photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Ben Rivers’s Bogancloch is an almost transcendentalist portrait of man and nature, witnessing (and staging) Jake Williams, a forest dweller, as he weathers the Scottish wilds with quiet dignity and rugged self-reliance. A bewitching alchemy exists between the filmmaker and his protagonist—reflected in Rivers’s coruscating 16mm celluloid cinematography—as the man we’ve observed for more than a decade in previous collaborations like This Land Is My Land, More Than Just a Dram, and Two Years at Sea now faces down his own mortality.