A still from The Wanting Mare. (Photo: Gravitas Ventures)
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Everything I’d read about
The Wanting Mare had me excited. Writer-director Nicholas Ashe Bateman spent five years making the film in a Patterson, NJ warehouse, doing many of the visual effects himself, envisioning it as the first in a full franchise exploring a vast new world. After watching the trailer, it became obvious that
It’s hard to find a word that best describes the genre-defying “The Wanting Mare,” except for maybe “impressive.” Not quite science-fiction at least not in any conventionally pulpy way this arty post-apocalyptic mood piece is mostly a triumph of DIY persistence for the writer-director Nicholas Ashe Bateman, who reportedly spent five years working on the digital effects to make a sparse set look like an entire ruined world.
Bateman only hints at where and when we are. We’re told at the start that in the land of Anmaere, there’s a swelteringly hot, crime-ridden city called Whithren, where once a year an enormous cargo ship sends some of the local wild horses across the water to a much colder and apparently less dangerous continent. Residents of Whithren spend much of their time trying to figure out a way to sail away.