Ben River’s Locarno Competition Entry ‘Mare’s Nest’ Goes to Rediance

Hot on the heels of Oliver Laxe’s Cannes Jury Prize win with “Sirât,” producer Andrea Queralt of Paris-based 4A4 Productions will be launching at Locarno’s International Competition “Mare’s Nest,” directed by Laxe’s long-time friend, veteran experimental U.K. filmmaker and artist Ben Rivers.

Ahead of its world premiere at the prominent Swiss festival, the pic was picked up for world sales by Rediance, marking the third collaboration between the Beijing-based outfit and the multi-awarded filmmaker after “Bogancloch,” recently acquired for North America by Cinema Guild, and the co-helmed “Krabi, 2562” which bowed respectively in Locarno’s International Competition in 2024 and at the festival’s ‘Moving Ahead’ strand in 2019.

Loyal to Rivers’ unique cinematic style which merges fiction, documentary, poetic essay and fable, “Mare’s Nest” tells of a young girl Moon (played by rising talent Moon Guo Barker) as she travels through a mysterious world free of adults.

According to the film’s logline, she meets a sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening. She also meets many others who show her different possibilities for living. Moon observes and and moves on into an unknown future.

Speaking to Variety, the Harvard University Radcliffe Fellowship recipient and Jarman Award winning filmmaker said his feature stems from “an accumulative feeling of dread” about the world adults are leaving to children.

COVID-19 and its effect on children, suddenly “locked away in their houses, not free to play and be wild,” was the first catalyst, but also the reading of the play “The Word for Snow” by U.S. author Don DeLillo which deals with climate change and which he wanted to include in the film. “Then I thought about my friend Moon [Guo Barker] and how she would be great as the lead, rambling through this world, observing, asking questions, meeting other children,” added the filmmaker. “Once I had Moon in my mind, the image of the film became clearer and it became a kind of near future road movie, a world that has an underlying sense of uncertainty and disturbance, but also about possibilities and joy.”

As with his 2015 Locarno Golden Leopard entry “The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers,” which blurred the lies between fiction and reality by inserting footage of his main protagonist – the filmmaker Laxe directing his own sophomore pic “Las Mimosas” in Morocco – “A Mare’s Nest” will feature a film within a film: Rivers’ “The Minotaur” (2022), presented in the pic as the children’s own creation. The short film tracks a group of children tormenting the mythical creature in a labyrinth in a Menorcan quarry.

“I love playing around with different layers of reality where you’re not completely sure what you’re watching,” Rivers observed.

Shot over three years between Menorca, Spain and the U.K., “A Mare’s Nest” was produced by Rivers for his U..K outfit Urth Films, together with Queralt, with backing from Arte France’s experimental doc strand La Lucarne, in co-production with Fabrizio Polpeti of France’s La Bête, and Aonan Yang of Canada’s GreenGround.

“The film is both unsettling and light, and truly captivating,” said Queralt who met Rivers through Laxe in 2016 and eagerly draws comparisons between the two auteurs in her roster. “Both ‘Sirât’ and “Mare’s Nest” are shot in film, and both Oliver and Ben let the landscape become alive. Their films have an earthy look and a timeless feeling and dimension that is refreshing and highly original,” said the Spanish-born producer who embraces all auteur voices and tries to adapt to their singular working methods.

While preparing for “Mare’s Nest’”s world premiere in Locarno, Queralt is closely monitoring the theatrical roll out of the Cannes sensation “Sirât” across the world.
Launched June 6 in Spain, the drama grossed €1.78 million ($2.08 million) through June 29 via BTeam and looks to still have legs. Next up is Portugal (Nitrato Filmes, July 31), Germany (Pandora, Aug. 14) and France (Pyramide, Sept. 10). According to Queralt, the film handled by The Match Factory has now sold out globally, including in the U.S. (Neon) and the U.K./Ireland (Altitude).