Artist in Focus: Mare's Nest

Mare's Nest

Cinéstesia Opening Film

United Kingdom, France, Canada | 2025 | 98 min

Language: English, Catalan

Subtitles: English

For all ages

Director(s): Ben Rivers

Script: Ben Rivers based on a play "The Word for Snow" (2007) by Don DeLillo

Cast: Moon Guo Barker, Astrid Ihora, Elahni-ja'nai Nembhard, Iris Andueza Reig, Saioia Andueza Reig, Sofia Hurtado Lichel, Abril Carrasco Tomás, Enric Puig Florit, Bazil Bekkari, Nazuele Lara Beltrá

Production: Urth Productions, 4A4 Productions

Distribution: Rediance

Experimental

On the Road Youth With Guests Literature Mystery

Cinéstesia

Screenings:

Ben Rivers’s most recent feature film, Mare’s Nest, takes its name from an idiomatic expression that designates something false or illusory. Female horses do not make nests, after all. While the saying typically might be understood as a negative judgment, for Rivers it is nothing of the sort. His film follows a young girl called Moon, played by Moon Guo Barker, who inhabits a world without adults, a world in the process of coming back to life after an untold apocalyptic event has transpired. It is, in other words, a kind of utopia, one that Rivers explores across an eight-chapter structure that notably includes a complete staging of novelist Don DeLillio’s one-act play The Word for Snow. In a time when so much feels to be in a state of decay, Rivers turns his attention to the unruly becoming of children to imagine how the present might not be an ending, but in fact the beginning of something as of yet unknown.

Curated by Erika Balsom

Updated 2026-07-30 17:30:10 UTC