EXCLUSIVE: Chinese sales agent Rediance has picked up international sales rights to Ben Rivers’ Mare’s Nest, ahead of its premiere at Locarno Film Festival, where the UK director has been selected to play in competition for the third time.
The UK-France-Canada production follows a young girl, played by Moon Guo Barker, who travels through a mysterious world free of adults, in which she meets a sage and her translator in a mountain hut, while trying to understand what is happening. She also meets others who show her different possibilities for living as she observes and moves into an unknown future.
Director Rivers began the project a few years ago after thinking about all the global scale anxieties faced by young people growing up in the world today.
“I wanted to create a world which was somehow hopeful while also with an underlying uncertainty about the future,” he said. “I wanted to make it with just children, with no relation at all to the adult world, and no explanation.”
A key inspiration came from reading short play The Word For Snow, written by Don DeLillo. Rivers subsequently made the film in episodes, working in school holidays with Moon and other children, mixing script with improvisation and inviting contributions from the performers.
“The film is about a kind of freedom, a positive kind of anarchy. The title is an old English saying, meaning a situation of great disorder and uncertainty,” he added.
The film is produced by Rivers’ Urth Films and Andrea Queralt’s 4A4 Productions, along with La Bête, Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains and GreenGround Productions.
Rivers is returning to the main competition at Locarno for the third time, having previously played there with 2015’s The Sky Trembles And The Earth Is Afraid And The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers and 2024’s Bogancloch. The latter won second prize for best feature film at Festival dei Popoli and Prix Nouvelles Vagues at Festival International du Film de La Roche-sur-Yon.
In 2019, Rivers was also at Locarno with Krabi, 2562, which he co-directed with Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong and was the opening film for the Moving Ahead section. Both Bogancloch and Krabi, 2562 are also represented by Rediance.
London-based Rivers has made around 40 short and feature length films that tread a fine line between documentary and fiction, and often focus on people who have separated themselves from mainstream society.
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