Mare’s Nest was awarded the Pardo Verde at Locarno Film Festival, and it’s easy to see why.
Among the many fascinating and visionary films in the International Competition (Concorso Internazionale) at the 78th Locarno Film Festival, one especially caught my attention and won my heart: Mare’s Nest (Ben Rivers, UK/France/Canada, 2025).
It’s a fable, a fantasy, placing a young girl—Moon (Moon Guo Barker)—as a modern Alice in a Wonderland not wonderous, but filled with wondering. A wondering that also fills the viewer during the 98-minute long film.
The first thing we see is a little tortoise in a dusty landscape. We hear the sound of a car crash. Out of the wreckage stumbles Moon. A bleeding scratch in her forehead, to which she doesn’t pay any attention. She picks up the tortoise, and while cuddling it, walking on a narrow, desolated and dusty road, she lectures it about evolution. A remarkable feeling of both dissonance and depth occurs from the contrast between Moon’s charming and childish appearance and the weight of her words, delivered to one of the oldest creatures on earth.
Ben Rivers structures the film as a plotless, nonlinear adventure, using chapters and silent-movie-like posters, bringing us into a postapocalyptic landscape inhabited only by children.
In one sequence, Don DeLillo’s play The Word for Snow is performed with poetic power and ecological as well as linguistic resonance by Moon, an obscure teacher, and a translator.
In another sequence, the Minotaur Myth is played out like a game by a group of children, filmed in the Lithica labyrinth in Menorca, Spain. It’s both playful and disturbing, casting a visual and emotionally powerful light on the thin line between childish play and violence. At the same time, it can be seen as a metaphor for film, for the way staging danger and violence can serve as a way to understand how violence occurs, how to deal with it, and how it can function as catharsis.
Despite this, Mare’s Nest is not burdened with a feeling of danger. Rivers’ approach to the topic and theme is remarkable playful, often poetic, sometimes funny, open in a way that challenges and creates a variety of reflections within the viewer. This emerges especially from the feeling of the timeless landscape that the images reflect, the beauty in the wasteland, and the use of both ancient and contemporary ruins. It’s like watching artifacts from the past and the future, like being on an archaeological journey to the past, the future, and the contemporary at the same time. Reflecting this—our past, our future, and the civilization we are about to hand over to our children—Rivers’ film pinpoints the changing climate and a future wasteland. This is also why it was the obvious winner of this year’s Pardo Verde Award. Quoting the festival’s description, the award goes to filmmakers who are carrying out a vision linked to a new conception of humanity on planet Earth. This is exactly what Mare’s Nest does in its softspoken yet harsh, energetic but also philosophical, simple and at the same time complex way. It’s a film filled with a kind of childlike curiosity that is deeply moving and intriguing.
Britt Sørensen
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025