Bogancloch is Ben Rivers' follow-up to his 2012 feature Two Years at Sea, as well as the shorts This Is My Land (2007) and I Know Where I'm Going (2009). All these films follow the life of the now-elderly hermit Jake Williams, who lives in remote Bogancloch, Aberdeenshire, quietly going about his day-to-day life. The film is mostly shot in black and white, with occasional bursts of vivid colour-particularly when Rivers films Jake's old travel photos, likely from the 1970s. Weathered and distorted by time and the elements, these images appear joyously 'smooshed', like psychedelic artefacts from a vanished past.
Jake is often seen communing with nature-listening to birdsong, observing the landscape, or simply sitting in stillness. From the expressions on his face, it feels fair to say that nature has become his lover. Ben Rivers, as usual, finds beauty in disarray and decrepitude, and occasional magic, helped along by the presence of a cat who comes across as Jake's familiar.
Bogancloch is an unobtrusive and charming ethnographic document of one of the last eccentrics.
