Ben Rivers
UK
2008 / Beta SP / 0:16:00

Exquisitely beautiful, poetic and serene, yet exact and rigorous in composition and timing, Ben Rivers’ Origin of the Species is a tentative, fleeting portrait of a man about whom we are told little but learn much: a man of inventions, of science, of solitude; and to whom Darwin’s The Origin of the Species is evidently dear.

Peter Liechti
Switzerland
2009 / 35 mm / 1:20:00

A hunter in a remote and idyllic forest stumbles on a make shift tent fashioned from sheets of plastic and containing the mummified remains of a corpse. A detailed journal found on site reveals the man committed suicide by self-imposed starvation. Who was this man? Why did he kill himself in such a manner? Inspired by this true event and by the novella 'Until I Am a Mummy' by Shimada Masahiko, Insects sensuously evokes the mysterious man's last days