#637 - Oliver Laxe and Ben Rivers on Crafting Sirāt and Mare's Nest

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival between filmmakers Oliver Laxe and Ben Rivers, moderated by NYFF programming advisor Antoine Thirion. Oliver Laxe’s Sirat returns to Film at Lincoln Center for a theatrical engagement beginning next Thursday, February 5th. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/sirat. On top of sharing an enthusiasm for mystery, the elements, and utopias, Ben Rivers and Oliver Laxe also shared a producer and a shooting location on their latest films. Rivers’s Mare’s Nest and Laxe’s Sirât are both apocalyptic road movies; the first follows a child through a variety of haunted landscapes in Spain and the United Kingdom, while the second follows a man, his young son, and a motley group of ravers as they try to find their way out of a besieged desert on the borderlands of Morocco, near Spain. Each film is a radical enigma that invites spectators to engage with cinema sensorially. NYFF was pleased to welcome Laxe and Rivers for a wide-ranging conversation about the making of their new films and their intersecting artistic and thematic preoccupations. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.