Last year, the experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers presented in Locarno Boganclocha black and white documentary in which he found for the third time – to film it in an organic way like an entomologist – an Ecossais living as a hermit in a Highlands forest, a highly cinematographic character. Twelve months later, the Londonian is already back with an even more arid film: Mare’s Nesta fiction in which he wanted to “create a universe of children imbued with uncertainty, echoing the anxieties of the world, while giving a little hope”.
At the heart of the story, a pre-adolescent man named Moon, interpreted by Moon Guo Barker, daughter of the writer and Sino-British director Xiaolu Guo, winner in Ticino du Léopard d’Or 2009 for She, a Chinese. Rivers filmed it between his 9 and 12 years. In a world without adults, here it is behind the wheel of an old car; Because of a turtle slowly hastened in the middle of the road, she embeds it in an embankment. She then won the shell tetrapod with her, and launches while walking in a long monologue on the evolution of molecules. The film, which is only pure intellectual concept, will then be made up of a succession of sequences, in black and white and in color, in which Moon will converse with a scholar or will meet wild children making community.