Scott Barley is a multifaceted artist-filmmaker, operating between Scotland and Wales, UK. His work has traversed the globe, being showcased in prominent institutions and festivals such as The Institute of Contemporary Arts London, BFI Southbank, Sheffield Doc Fest, Centre of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, and many more.
His cinematic endeavors revolve around the themes of the anthropocene, nature, darkness, cosmology, phenomenology, and mysticism, often aligning with the Remodernist and Slow Cinema movements. His distinctive filmmaking style has drawn comparisons to renowned filmmakers like Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, David Lynch, Maya Deren, Aleksandr Sokurov, Stan Brakhage, Peter Hutton, Jean Epstein, and Philippe Grandrieux, as well as esteemed artists such as J. M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Anselm Kiefer, Arkhip Kuindzhi, Michael Biberstein, and John Martin.
Since 2015, Barley has exclusively shot his films on iPhone, showcasing his versatility and creative prowess. His short film, Hinterlands, was voted one of the best films of 2016 in Sight & Sound's yearly film poll. His feature-length debut, Sleep Has Her House, received widespread acclaim and won the Jury Award for Best Film at Fronteira International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival in 2017. The film went on to receive nominations in Sight & Sound's 2017 and 2018 film polls, as well as in Senses of Cinema's 2017 poll and The Village Voice 2017 film poll.
In 2018, Barley co-founded Obscuritads, an international collective focused on rendering the invisible visible, alongside filmmakers Mikel Guillen and Miquel Escudero Diéguez.
In 2020, film historian and theoretician Nicole Brenez listed Sleep Has Her House as one of the ten best films of the decade, praising Barley's visual poetry and describing him as "one of the most gifted visual poets of his generation." The same year, academic and film critic Borja Castillejo Calvo cited Sleep Has Her House as the second best film of the 2010's and Womb (2017) as the best short film of the decade.
As of 2022, Barley is in production with his second feature-length film, The Sea Behind Her Head, produced by Luke Moody and funded by the British Film Institute (BFI) and DocSociety. Danish film critic Tue Steen Müller has aptly described him as the "Anselm Kiefer of cinema."
