1000 Nights in the Dark: Slow Action (2010)

Short Feature Film | Sci-fi | English | 45m

Capsule review | 206 words | 19/10/11 | 2010 Favourites

Set a couple of hundred years into the post-apocalyptic future, when water levels have risen to such a level as to have made the world but a series of small island communities, Rivers’s hypnotically unsettling piece of science-fiction exposes our ignorance of our own world by highlighting its very alienness. The film takes the form of a series of four faux-ethnographic studies of these island communities, assembled from mostly real documentary footage (with some of it doctored and some of it staged), scored to the music of ‘70s sci-fi, with voiceover narration filled with deliciously inventive anthropological detail. The fact that, even without this fantastical narration, the footage would have seemed unfathomably alien to our Western-centric eyes, only goes to show, even in this age of Google Earth, Twitter, and 24 hour news, how disconnected we, as a species, often still are. Of course, that might just be me and my Western guilt, as Rivers himself has stated (more soberly and philosophically) that his interest lies in “island biogeography – the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat,” which would suggest that the material is much less accusatory than my eyes and ears would have it. Fascinating, whatever the case.

1000 Nights in the Dark: a collection of reviews of the single sentence, capsule, short, medium, and long variety, varying in length from fifty to a thousand-plus words, documenting my personal, exploratory journey through cinephilia.