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A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 Fipresci award recipient, Ben Russell (b.1976, USA) is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. Formal investigations of the historical and conceptual relationships between early cinema, documentary practices, and structuralist filmmaking result in immersive experiences concerned at once with ritual, communal spectatorship and the pursuit of a 'psychedelic ethnography.' Ben has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Viennale, and the Museum of Modern Art. He began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space Ben Russell in Chicago, IL, has toured worldwide with film / video / performance programs and was named by Cinemascope in 2012 as one of the '50 Best Filmmakers Under 50.'
- Tiger Award for Short Film - International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015
- Torino International Film Festival
- Wexner Center for the Arts
- Documenta Madrid
- Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Wexner
- Viennale
- MoMA
Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the Ancestors documents the dream lives of the territory’s inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve and expand. Equal parts documentary, ethnography and dream cinema, herein is a world whose borders are constantly dematerializing. [...] Taken as a whole, the film draws from subjects already deeply invested in the divine power of dreams to produce a work that is at once embodied, political, and deeply hypnagogic. Greetings takes on the challenge that the Surrealists outlined in the 1920s – for cinema to be fully realized as the waking state of dreams, one that we all can inhabit. (Ben Russell)