One week exclusive run!

As collaborators, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, two intrepid and nomadic talents of experimental film and art, have created one of the most bewitching cinematic experiences to come along in a great while. In A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, Robert A.A. Lowe, the celebrated musician behind Lichens and Om, gives a strangely affecting, perhaps even trance-inducing performance as the film’s Parsifal figure, a quixotic man who embarks on a quest for utopia—the holy grail of infinite truth, self-knowledge, and spiritual connectedness. He finds some measure of it in three seemingly disparate contexts: in a small collective community on a remote Estonian island, in isolation in the northern Finnish wilderness, and onstage fronting a black metal band in Norway. While his experience seems to be a perpetual one of home, exile, and return, for us, it is purely magical. A KimStim Release.

New Directors/New Films 2014

“Provocative… Rivers and Russell have certainly cast a spell that sticks.” “A scattered tapestry of beautifully rendered concepts…impressively committed to its poetic design.” – Eric Kohn, Indiewire

“Hypnotic” – Cath Clarke, Time Out

“Arresting” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“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

“Elegantly artistic and engagingly challenging… It is a film that aims to challenge and provoke and succeeds on that score.” – Mark Adams, Screen Daily

“A gift” – John Semley, Slant Magazine