Guy Ben-Ner’s video works since 1996 are centered on his own performative presence and his relationship with his family. Testing on his own private territory (both emotionally and physically) the different kinds of familial settings and circumstances, he brings his public to reflect upon universal values and behaviours which are produced by the connection between the social environment and the human being’s natural attitudes.
Although shot at home and usually with his children, Ben-Ner's films are far from home movies. They are sequences of carefully planned scenes, each film is in fact preceded by a copious storyboard drawings. The interest in the works of the mid-1960 and early 1970s’ body artists such as Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and Dennis Oppenheim, and the fascination with filmic situations in which the director, the cameraman, the leading actor and the stuntman are all one and the same, led Ben-Ner to deepen his interest in the early films of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and specially Buster Keaton. The work of these pioneer filmmakers, in fact, influenced his films in different ways. “Especially significant for Ben-Ner were Keaton's accounts of his family life as a child, reflecting a total blurring of the boundaries between professional and private life, between the "home" and the "stage”” (Sergio Edelsztein).

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