Partly based on Don DeLillo's one-act play The Word for Snow and shot on luminous 16mm, Mare's Nest combines elements of fiction, documentary, poetic essay and fable. A young girl called Moon (an astonishing Moon Guo-Barker, then 9 years old) journeys through a strange future world entirely devoid of adults, where children have inherited the remnants of a fallen civilization and begun forging new forms of community, ritual and meaning. Filmed across caves, coastlines, quarries, deserts and barren expanses in Spain and Wales, Rivers sidesteps the familiar tropes of post-apocalyptic cinema in favour of something stranger, quieter and more open-ended.
Preceded by Rivers' new short The Wind, One Brilliant Day, starring Tang Wei. Inspired by a poem by Antonio Machado, a woman walks through an ancient garden and speaks to the wind. The film premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival.
The screening is followed by a Q&A with Ben Rivers.
