“It’s a blessing that Ben Rivers wanted to visit this man’s life again, and his flowing filmmaking style is still bewitchingly gripping.”

It’s been 13 years since Ben Rivers’ debut feature Two Years at Sea premiered in Venice. It was his second collaboration with Jake Williams after the short This Is My Land. Both films were about the way of life of a man with a highly cinematic face living alone near a forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. They were hybrid projects, mixing fictional elements created for the film with Williams’ own habits and daily routines. Rivers now returns to his farmhouse called Bogancloch. But the key part here is the ’13 years’ really, since the main theme in both feature projects, Two Years at Sea and his latest, Bogancloch, has been time itself.

The film starts with an actual return to Bogancloch. We’re not yet sure from where. Williams’ trailer is attached to the back of his car, and we understand he still sleeps in it. But the car is much newer, a more current model. This means he’s earning or has earned money in all these years in-between. This aspect of Williams’ life is not something the storylines of the films have been interested in before. Romanticizing is a fair criticism of the films, and the economics of a solitary life does not fit that tone. But still, the title Two Years at Sea referred to the time he spent working literally at sea to be able to afford this isolation. What is he doing now, 13 years older, with his whiter hair, his wrinkled skin, his weaker body?

The structure is similar to the previous film, as is its grainy 16mm look. Fixed photographs from Williams’ own past divide chapters. And this time they all seem to be from an Arabic country. Did Jake work in Dubai for a while? He brings out some old tapes we have never seen before. All Arabic. Williams listens to them, hums some of the melodies. At this late age, when life is not as easy and flexible as before, he must be longing for the strong and active days of youth.

But time cannot be reversed, we are powerless against time. Therefore, life and death; the world, and our existence, is theirs. As the song at the heart of the film puts in clear words: “Says life, the world is mine…” Bogancloch has many similar elements in filmmaking to Two Years at Sea, but Rivers also does a lot of things differently. Other people enter our world. Hikers passing through the forest, singing songs by the campfire as Williams joins them. We know in actual life Williams has always been open and even inviting to other people joining him. His life is not that isolated. We witness him interacting with people this time, we hear his voice. Singing, but also teaching. Yes, this must be how he earns his freedom. He teaches children science, and in the one class scene he talks about the planets. But mainly about how the planets move, and how the positions of the sun, and the moon, and the earth define what we call days, nights, months, years. And all these lead to the same theme it has always been about…

Time. It’s not a coincidence both films take place throughout four seasons when, in both cases, the structure makes you feel like it’s two days, or three at most. But the climate changes, snow-covered nature or the effects of summer make you realize how time stretches here in this rural zone. And the point is, we’re so little; tiny dots really, not just in the vastness of the earth or the universe, but fundamentally in time. Aging and death: we’re helpless against them. Jake Williams and Ben Rivers ruminate on these matters with the language of film. And offer peace in there somewhere.

Some of the new routes, like a brief scene in color after the campfire, feel unearned and just put in for the sake of non-repetitive stylistic choices. Personally, I don’t think Bogancloch is as refined as Two Years at Sea. But even to have a reunion with Jake Williams, and to witness him in this stage of life, offers a unique experience. It’s a blessing that Ben Rivers wanted to visit this man’s life again, and his flowing filmmaking style is still bewitchingly gripping.

A line of dialogue from Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera came back to me while watching Bogancloch, when Italia is asking about the abandoned train station: “Does it belong to everyone, or does it belong to no one?” And that, I think, is the question.