From mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin, this is a dizzying 16mm portrait of an increasingly chaotic present, one whose political contours are affected by everything and nothing all at once. In the words of Zadie Smith: Time is not what it is / But how it is felt ​

Another Earth repeatedly invokes a line from the writer Zadie Smith: time is not what it is, but how it is felt. In this political essay film, Ben Russell weaves civilization, history, and the spectacles of the present into an organic whole through which to consider contemporary political issues. The film opens simply, with a half-cropped face reciting lines on humanity’s subterranean prehistory. As the words are recited, Russell steadily layers new images onto the screen: markings in a cave, a child playing by a lake, Netanyahu and the panelists of a television talk show, a hand endlessly scrolling through smartphone reels filled with apocalyptic war reports, and sites of destruction.
These appear in succession and overlap one another, forming a dizzying, rotating portrait of a present sinking ever deeper into chaos. Through it, Russell suggests that the political contours of the present are shaped by everything at once and, at the same time, by nothing at all.

• ProducerBen RUSSELL
• Cinematography Ben RUSSELL
• Edit Ben RUSSELL
• Sound Ben RUSSELL

Ben RUSSELL | br@dimeshow.com ​