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 KimStim
-
Stonewalling
Directed by Ji Huang, Ryûji Otsuka • Drama • With Honggui Yao • 2022 • 148 minutes
20 year-old Lynn is told she needs English classes, flight attendant school, and a go getter-attitude. She perseveres along this path of upward mobility until she finds out she’s pregnant. Indecisive and running o...
-
Tatsumi
Directed by Eric Khoo • Animation • With Tetsuya Bessho, Yoshihiro Tatsumi • 2011 • 98 minutes
TATSUMI celebrates the life and work of Japanese comics artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi-a manga pioneer who elevated the genre to a new level of creative expression and adult realism. A comics-crazed teenager...
-
This Is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and ...
Directed by Yung Chang • Documentary • With Robert Fisk • 2019 • 109 minutes
For more than 40 years, journalist Robert Fisk has reported on some of the most violent and divisive conflicts in the world.
Yung Chang’s This Is Not a Movie captures Fisk in action—feet on the ground, notebook in hand...
