NYFF was pleased to welcome Oliver Laxe and Ben Rivers for a wide-ranging conversation about the making of their new films and their intersecting artistic and thematic preoccupations.

Sirāt opens at FLC for an exclusive one-week engagement beginning November 13, featuring Q&As with Oliver Laxe. Get tickets!

On top of sharing an enthusiasm for mystery, the elements, and utopias, British artist Rivers and Galician director Laxe also shared a producer and a shooting location on their latest films. Rivers’s Mare’s Nest and Laxe’s Sirāt 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.

The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Oliver Laxe and Ben Rivers at NYFF63. Photo by Arin Sang-urai.