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"One of cinema's most beautiful achievements of the last handful of years ... with each frame seemingly ripped out of a museum." – Criterion Cast
Using Paul Bowles' short story A Distant Episode as a jumping-off point, British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers (A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, MIFF 2013; Two Years at Sea, MIFF 2011) forges into new terrain with his latest: a sublimely shot, deeply enigmatic film that wanders the spaces between documentary and fable.
Against the surreal landscape of the Moroccan desert, rendered here in breathtaking 16mm CinemaScope, Rivers goes behind the scenes on a dissolute film production that eventually comes to a halt when its young director, Oliver Laxe (Mimosas, MIFF 2016), walks away into the unknown – from documentary into fiction, from one movie into another – where he's forced into captivity by locals to become the "King of Cans". So goes Rivers' hallucinatory narrative excursion, which reimagines Bowles' brutal colonialist tale as a meditation on madness, the boundaries between illusion and reality, and the cinema itself. It is, perhaps, Rivers' most profound, yet most accessible, work yet.
"The environment's inherent violence, the gritty air and feverish heat of the desert seemed to ooze out of the screen, which, combined with the beauty of the images, made for a singularly breathtaking experience." – Filmmaker