Scott Barley is an artist-filmmaker 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 work has been been written about in Sight and Sound, MUBI Notebook, Film Comment, Frieze, Screen, and Sabzian, and have been the subject of academic analysis at conferences and in theses at the University of Melbourne, Goldsmiths, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris, University of Porto, and Stavanger Art Museum Norway.

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 a lecture given at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, she placed him in the pantheon of visionary artists, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Epstein, and Stan Brakhage.

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) with Sleep Has Her House and several of Barley’s short films informing the film.

He is currently working with Palestinian-British filmmaker, Saeed Taji Farouky (A Thousand Fires, Winner of Marco Zucchi Award, Locarno 2021) as a cinematographer and artist on his upcoming feature film.

Barley has taught Film, Television and Visual Arts internationally from foundation to doctorate levels, including at Winchester School of Art, American University of Paris, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, University of Chile, and Centre for Visual Communications Belgrade. He has worked at Falmouth University as an Associate Lecturer in Film and Television since 2020, and as a Research Associate at the Sound/Image Cinema Lab since 2024. He has worked as an external mentor for Film London's FLAMIN Fellowship programme and L’Alternativa Professionals Barcelona, advising on all stages of film production. He is available for lectures, masterclasses, private tuition and consultation services worldwide.

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 multimedia works. 

For screening inquiries, commissions, collaborations, lecturing and mentorship, or any other inquiries, please contact Scott Barley ︎

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