A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
US Indies
•
1h 38m
Directed by Ben Rivers & Ben Russell • Drama • With Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe • 2014 • 98 minutes
A SPELL follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland; and during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black metal band in Norway. Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty and an optimism of the darkest sort.
Starring musician Robert AA Lowe (best known for his intense live performances under the name LICHENS) in the lead role, A SPELL lies somewhere between fiction and non-fiction - it is at once a document of experience and an experience itself, an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation.
"With its very title, A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS is a film that announces itself as being in league with forces not entirely of this world."—Michael Sicinski, Cinemascope
"A tapestry of beautifully rendered concepts...impressively committed to its poetic design."—Eric Kohn, Indiewire
Up Next in US Indies
-
Some Divine Wind
Directed by Roddy Bogawa • Drama • 1991 • 72 minutes
SOME DIVINE WIND - a rough translation referring to Japanese Kamikaze pilots (on 'God's wind') - is the story of Ben, an American-born young man of mixed parentage, whose father was part of a bombing mission that destroyed his Japanese mother'...
-
You Go to My Head
Directed by Dimitri de Clercq • Drama • With Delfine Bafort, Svetozar Cvetkovic, Arend Pinoy, Omar Sarnane, Laurence Tremolet • 2018 • 120 minutes
This award-winning, critically lauded thriller begins in a desolate stretch of the Sahara, where a mysterious car accident leaves a young woman lost ...
-
Bad Fever
Directed by Dustin Guy Defa • Drama • With Kentucker Audley, Eleonore Hendricks • 2012 • 77 minutes
Alternatively quiet and delirious, always desperate, Bad Fever is a witness to one man’s broken American dream and his eternal longing to find someone, anyone, who understands or even pretends to ...
