On Aug. 9, Locarno Film Festival’s red carpet will be rolled out for the second time in a row to the acclaimed U.K. experimental filmmaker and artist Ben Rivers. After “Bogancloch” – acquired for North America by Cinema Guild – the helmer’s latest work, “Mare’s Nest,” will vie for the festival’s Golden Leopard. Its next festival stop will be Toronto where it will open the Wavelength section. Variety debuts the trailer here.
Wrapped in Rivers’ signature cinematic style which merges fiction, documentary, poetic essay and fable, the movie is loosely based on U.S. author and playwright Don DeLillo’s play about climate change “The Word for Snow.” In the all-child-cast futuristic road-movie, we follow the young girl Moon (played by rising talent Moon Guo Barker) as “she travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults” the logline reads.
“Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future,” it continues.
The film was produced by Rivers’ Urth Films with Paris-based Andrea Queralt of 4A4 Production and backing from Arte France’s La Lucarne, Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto, in co-production with France’s La Bête, and Canada’s GreenGround.
Rediance handles sales. We spoke to Rivers ahead of Locarno.
What was the genesis for the film?
I can’t pin it down to a single genesis, it’s an accumulative feeling of dread about the world children are being left by adults. I initially started writing the film during the pandemic. I couldn’t help thinking about kids being locked away in their houses, not free to play and be wild. My own childhood in contrast was incredibly free and wild. We lived in a Somerset village, didn’t have much money, yet I had a great time, playing on abandoned buildings on my friend’s farm. My mum wouldn’t see me all day, but we were all fine.
I also thought about climate change and the control from authorities, enabled by COVID, to a level that we hadn’t experienced before. So I started imagining a world of total freedom, with no adults, a place of a positive kind of anarchy.
Simultaneously, I came across the play “The Word for Snow” by Don DeLillo, a writer I very much admire. I thought that the play spoke to a lot of the fears and concerns many people are having, and wanted to include it in the film. Then I thought about my friend Moon [young debutante Moon Guo Barker] and how she would be great as the lead, rambling through this world, observing, asking questions, meeting other children.
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.
The film is crafted in captivating chapters. How did you come up with this structure?
It may be from my love of literature, in particular the peripatetic kind, like “Candide.” I wanted shifts in tone throughout Moon’s journey, and I also really like these inter-titles, again like in literature which give a clue to what’s coming next. These were written on a chalk board by Moon and I. She writes the title of the chapter and I write what she’s going to do. But the sections were also practical.
I started the film without all the funding in place, and continued that way, raising a little bit of money and filming a section, raising some more and so on. So it was very fragmented filming on an extremely low budget, and the chapters made that way of production more possible. This was partly because I didn’t want to write a full script, which makes it hard to fundraise for. I needed there to be space for improvisation and play.
Ben Rivers
Credit: Lisa Whiting
How was your experience of working with an ensemble cast made only of children?
I had around 25 kids, most of them aged between six and 12. I wanted the kids to be pre-teens, when you start thinking of your image.
Working with children has been amazing and inspiring. I’d like to do it again. Moon has been especially key to the whole process, which was quite long. The entire film took three years to make. I was filming on and off “Bogancloch,” but also working around school holidays, while trying to raise financing for the film, which proved difficult. Then of course, during the financing stage, so many children were being killed in Palestine. You feel so awful about our world where kids are dying instead of playing. All this fed into this work.
The first filming we did was the play [“The Word for Snow”], when Moon was still nine years old, and we did the last bit of filming when she just turned 12. She has amazing energy and plenty of ideas, so we can discuss scenes and thoughts, and there’s a lot of laughing and playing about.
The film was written, and the play is performed verbatim, but then there are many other parts where I wanted to allow for improvisation, so the children could be free to move in their own way, which meant allowing for time, to discover things while filming. I also tried to find ways to include the children in the process. For example, they all helped make their own costumes, and young Gene wrote his own song he sings near the end of the film.
How much rehearsal was necessary for the three children to deliver the complex Don DeLillo text, and for Moon to prepare for her long opening monologue?
I gave them the DeLillo text a few weeks before filming, which they read many times and practised with me or their parents. It was still very hard to remember the whole play of course, so we worked out ways to prompt during the filming, which took place over three days on a set. The three of them took it extremely seriously, which is what the text requires, as it’s complex and I wanted to stick completely to DeLillo’s play.
For the opening monologue Moon again read it many times over, and I would occasionally say the first word of a sentence from behind the camera and she would remember the rest. It’s a long shot and I was amazed at how natural she made it.
Another literary work brought twice to the screens, William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” features a dystopian world inhabited only by children-boys. Did you have it in the back of your mind?
I love that book. It’s absolutely brilliant, but my film in a way is the opposite. The more I was thinking about the situation in the world, the more I was determined to make a film without conflict. Having the kids trying to make their way in a non-violent way.
Tell us about the idea of inserting your own seven-minute film “The Minotaur” in “The Mare’s Nest” and how you found the amazing Menorcan location for your film?
The way I think of film is often helped by locations. Here, I was shown a quarry in Menorca [Spain], where people stopped working 30 years ago. A woman sculptor built an amazing stone labyrinth there, and I felt I should do my version of “The Minotaur” there. It ended up being a film within a film, although in “The Mare’s Nest,” the children are supposed to have made it themselves. I love playing around with different layers of reality, where you’re not completely sure what you’re watching.
After the filming of “The Minotaur” in that quarry, I went back twice for about a week for the scenes where Moon meets the community of kids, and they live in caves, perform etc. That location was perfect for the film in which you don’t really know where you are. But I also filmed in Wales as I needed bad weather as well!
The grainy 16mm look wonderfully captures the natural settings, the warmth and empathy that emanates from the storytelling. Tell us about your passion for 16mm film?
Yes this was shot in Super 16. I love it! There’s a magic quality to it, plus the tension from filming on film is unique. You really feel you have to commit to it. That said, having 25 kids wasn’t easy and while filming I sometimes wished I was filming in digital. But I had made my decision and had to stick to it.
Why did you choose “Mare’s Nest” for the title and ultimately, what do you hope the audience will take away from watching the film?
“Mare’s Nest” was the title right from the start. I like the mystery of it. It’s an old saying meaning an unexplainable situation, or one that is deceptive. It was written in my notebook before I even started writing the film properly. The film presents a mysterious situation, one with very dark undertones, about the planet and why these children are alone. I wanted to create a world which is both disturbing and strange, but also has some hope, about reinvention and trying to move beyond the systems which humans have created and right now feel impossible to break out of.
You’ve produced the film with Paris-based Andrea Queralt, co-credited for “Sirât” by Oliver Laxe, with whom you’ve also worked on multiple occasions. How was your collaboration with Andrea?
Andrea and I have been friends for many years. I started making the film by myself, then when Arte’s Rasha Salti [commissioning editor for the experimental docu program ‘La Lucarne’] showed some interested at an early stage and came up with an important share of the financing, I approached Andrea and we decided to work together to raise the money. France is very supportive of cinema in a way that is more complicated in the U.K.. This is my seventh feature film, and most of my films were funded from abroad.
Your work is often exhibited in art galleries. What’s planned with “The Mare’s Nest”?
There will be an installation co-organised with Batahla Centre de Cinema in Porto, Portugal, as they supported the film, but I haven’t quite worked it out yet. I also took many photos during the making of, so they may be included in that exhibition.
(This interview has been edited and condensed)
