Scott Barley

Scott Barley is an artist-filmmaker, cinematographer, musician, and lecturer based in Scotland. His work is primarily concerned with the anthropocene, nature, darkness, absence, cosmology, phenomenology, and mysticism. He has exhibited at film festivals and art galleries worldwide, including ICA London, Jeu de Paume Paris, Doclisboa, Karlovy Vary IFF, Venice Biennale, QAGOMA, MoMA Río de Janeiro, and MoCA Busan.

Since 2015, Scott has made films solo, switching from ARRI cameras and larger crews to almost exclusively shooting his films on iPhone, and carrying out all aspects of production (direction, writing, cinematography, sound, post-production, and distribution) himself, with an emphasis on poetics, nature, and environmental sustainability.

His short film, Hinterlands was voted one of the best films of 2016 in Sight and Sound's annual film poll. Scott's first feature, Sleep Has Her House was released in 2017. It received the Jury Award for Best Film at Fronteira International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, Brazil. It later received nominations in Sight and Sound’s 2017 and 2018 annual best film polls.

In 2018, Barley co-founded Obscuritads — an international collective focused on “rendering the invisible visible” through cinema, fine art, digital ecologies and their intersection — with filmmaker, Mikel Guillen (Toronto) and curator and programmer, Miquel Escudero Diéguez (Paris, Barcelona). American filmmaker, Phil Solomon (1954–2019) is an honorary member.

In 2020, film historian, and Jean-Luc Godard's editor for Le Livre d’Image (Cannes Film Festival’s Special Palme d'Or Winner) Nicole Brenez cited Sleep Has Her House as one of the ten best films of the decade, after previously writing that “[Barley’s] films renew our conception of visuality”, and describing him as “one of the most gifted visual poets of his generation”.

In 2022, Sleep Has Her House was included in the decennial Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films of All Time, receiving votes in both the Critics’ and Directors' polls as one of the ten greatest films ever made. A revised and remastered version of the film was completed in 2023.

Outside of his own solo filmography, Barley has worked with other filmmakers as a cinematographer, multimedia artist, and consultant. He was cinematographer and multimedia artist for To the Moon (Tadhg O’Sullivan, 2020) with Jimmy Gimferrer, cinematographer for Birdsong and Story of My Death (Albert Serra, 2008, 2013), Joshua Bonetta (El Mar La Mar, 2017), and artist-filmmaker, Margaret Salmon. As a pre-production consultant, he contributed to the upcoming tenth feature film, Silent Friend (starring Léa Seydoux and Tony Leung Chiu-wai) by Academy Award nominee Ildikó Enyedi (On Body and Soul, Golden Bear winner, 2017).

Danish film critic, and former director of the European Documentary Network, Tue Steen Müller has described him as the “Anselm Kiefer of cinema”.

His second feature film, The Sea Behind Her Head, funded by the British Film Institute (BFI) and Doc Society, is currently in production, along with several new short films, and a series of multimedia works, funded by Creative Scotland.