Responding to a world that seems evermore surreal, disastrous, and doomed by the day, the latest speculative feature by British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers immerses us into an unsettling natural terrain — equal parts bucolic and wasteland — entirely devoid of adults. In a return of sorts to Rivers’ 2008 short film Ah, Liberty!, also shot exclusively with children and inspired by the filmmaker’s childhood spent in a small village where detritus doubled as playground, in Mare’s Nest we follow a girl called Moon (an astonishing Moon Guo-Barker, then 9 years old), who adventures alone through the uncanny landscapes, encountering a turtle and other children along the way. 

While fictional, to be sure, and the closest Rivers has hewed to the genre in years, what transpires harbours compelling resonances with our moment of great uncertainty, invoking philosophical and contemporary issues of climate catastrophe, communication, and human division. While many scenes are wordless and gestural in nature, the artist’s long-held fascination with language returns, including a remarkable extended scene adapted from Don DeLillo’s one-act play “The Word for Snow”. Shot in a tactile mix of colour and black and white Super 16mm, with Rivers’ typically sterling eye, the images we see are supernal, and consistently imbued with wonderment. An important contribution to work made with children —Alanis Obomsawin and Gunvor Nelson come to mind — and a meaningful exploration of the ways in which stories can be formed, told, and transmitted, Mare’s Nest is all at once a film of plants and animals, of car graveyards and caves, of games and imagination, and a film of great beauty and mystery.

The screening is followed by a Q&A with Ben Rivers.