Moon travels through a mysterious world free of adults. She meets a sage, and her translator, in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening. She meets many others who show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future. 

Ben Rivers’s new film, inspired by Don DeLillo’s one-act play The Word for Snow, listens to children reflecting on climate anxiety, memory, and language. A child emerges from the wreckage of a car, walks into the sunset, picks up a tortoise, and begins explaining the origins of humanity. Her name is Moon. She wanders through a post-apocalyptic world from which adults have vanished, for reasons the film never explains.
Mare’s Nest returns to Rivers’s abiding concerns with freedom, utopia, alternative ways of living, and imagined futures. Composed as an episodic fable that collapses boundaries of time and space, it is a film of disorder and reinvention, where the ruins of the past become playgrounds for generations to come. At once hauntingly desolate and newly hopeful, it invites us to imagine what kind of world children might build after our own has disappeared. The film veers between digital and celluloid, seductive color and austere black-and-white, wordless passages and torrents of wordplay. Its beautifully composed images include cave scenes that seem drawn from a Romantic painting.

Growing up amid global crises, a group of children enters a world shaped by hope and uncertainty, untouched by adult explanations or authority. During school holidays, Moon and the other performers move through a series of loosely connected episodes created from scripts, improvisation, and their own ideas. Inspired by Don DeLillo’s short play The Word for Snow, the children imagine forms of freedom beyond adult order. Their games, gestures, and encounters unfold as a positive anarchy, while the old English phrase “mare’s nest” evokes the disorder and doubt surrounding the future they may inherit.

• ProducerBen RIVERS, Andrea QUERALT
• Screenplay Ben RIVERS
• Cinematography Ben Rivers, Carmen Pellon
• Edit Armiliah Aripin, Ben Rivers
• Sound Dana Farzanehpour, Philippe Ciompi, Ben Rivers
• Cast Moon Guo BARKER

Rediance | Jing XU | jing@rediancefilms.com