Ben Rivers's MARE'S NEST (2025) — LA Premiere!

7th House is very proud to present a special two-day engagement and LA premiere of internationally renowned filmmaker Ben Rivers’s acclaimed new feature film MARE’S NEST (2025). One of contemporary cinema’s true singulars, Rivers crafts films that drift between documentary, speculative fiction, ethnography, and ethereal reverie—works devoted to solitary lives, marginal worlds, and alternative ways of existing beyond the rhythms of contemporary society. Shot on luminous 16mm film and imbued with a dreamlike atmosphere, MARE’S NEST conjures a haunting and deeply imaginative vision of a future world shaped by ecological collapse, disappearing language, and the fragile but hopeful emergence of a new world.

Based in part on American novelist Don DeLillo’s one-act play The Word for Snow, MARE’S NEST unfolds in a world without adults, where language itself has begun to unravel and lose its connection to the physical world it once described. The film follows Moon, a young girl wandering through strange landscapes and forgotten terrains, encountering solitary figures living according to their own cryptic rituals, philosophies, and modes of survival. Guided by a sage and her interpreter in a remote mountain dwelling, she searches for meaning amid uncertainty, disappearance, and transformation. Shot across caves, coastlines, quarries, deserts, and barren expanses in Spain and Wales, Rivers’s latest feature sidesteps the familiar tropes of post-apocalyptic cinema in favor of something stranger, quieter, and more open-ended: a speculative folk tale shaped by myth, memory, ritual, and the possibility of reinventing the world after the collapse of the old one.

Equally at home in major international museums, galleries, and theatrical cinemas, Rivers (TWO YEARS AT SEA, A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS) has spent the last two decades building one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary moving-image art: tactile, mysterious, deeply human films that blur the boundaries between observation, myth, and cinematic trance. Winner of the Pardo Verde at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival, MARE’S NEST confirms Ben Rivers as one of contemporary cinema’s most adventurous and visionary artists while standing as one of his most immersive, emotionally resonant, and hauntingly beautiful works to date—a dreamy and lyrical meditation on language, memory, myth, and what human life might become beyond the ruins of the contemporary world.

Dir. Ben Rivers, 2025, 98 mins, UK/France/Canada, English/Catalan, Unrated, Color and Black & White, Digital

Tickets: $12 (All Screenings Are In Person Only)

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

ADVISORY DISCLAIMER

With some exception, The Philosophical Research Society’s 7th House Screenings does not typically provide advisory warnings about potentially upsetting content or subject matter, as sensitivities are particular to each viewer. Please be sure to read event listings, research on the web, or visit Common Sense Media, IMDb, and DoesTheDogDie.com for thorough info on content and age-appropriateness. If you have any specific content advisory questions, please email [email protected].

CONTENT DISCLAIMER

The views, opinions, and thoughts expressed within exhibited works are solely those of their creators and may not represent those of the Philosophical Research Society (PRS), its affiliates, or any individuals associated with PRS. Screenings are intended for educational and entertainment purposes.

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