Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s feature debut will arrive next month with fantasy drama, The Wanting Mare. Gravitas Ventures acquired the pic for its digital and limited theatrical release from February 5. Bateman wrote and directed the pic, serving up a visual delight that harnesses his best in VFX and digital artistry with shortfilm credits like The Circus Animals, Free Solo and The History of Monsters, and upcoming Dev Patel starrer, The Green Knight.
Gravitas is out with an image gallery above and poster, trailer and details below.
Nothing can prepare audiences for the secrets, seduction, and sights of THE WANTING MARE, an intimate, dramatic fantasy epic written and directed by renowned digital artist Nicholas Ashe Bateman (visual effects supervisor of David Lowery’s upcoming The Green Knight).
In the world of Anmaere, north of the city of Whithren, wild horses run through the moorlands and up the coast. These horses are the city’s most valuable export and, as a result, are hunted, trapped, sold, and shipped across the sea once a year. For those in Whithren, this trade passage creates lucrative and exciting possibilities: the chance to escape their constantly sweltering city and escape to the Western continent of Levithen, or simply to begin again.
Meanwhile, in a small house just north of the city, a young woman dies in childbirth. Her last words are an attempt to tell her daughter of the life she’ll have and her inheritance of a recurring dream that must be kept secret — for it contains the memories of another age long before us, one where magic and myth were alive in the world.
That daughter now left behind is Moira. She grows alone in Whithren, without anyone to explain her dream, her unique difference, or her place in the world. As a result, she resolves to leave Whithren at all costs, and employs the help of Lawrence, a wounded young man engaged in the criminal enterprise of stealing tickets.
This begins a series of events that echo over the next thirty-five years of their life, the life of a child found screaming on the rocks, and through the alleys and coasts of Whithren… a city hidden in the fog, wanting in heat, now beginning again.
A technical marvel of digital world-building and independent ambition, the sprawling vistas, fantastical sights, and otherworldly tableaus of THE WANTING MARE were lensed almost entirely inside a warehouse in Paterson, New Jersey. Over five years in the making, the film’s hundreds of complex visual effects seamlessly blend digital landscapes and physical reality, bringing Whithren and its greater world to unbelievable life.
Writer/director Nicholas Ashe Bateman has created THE WANTING MARE as the first, intimate chapter in a long line of films about the people, places, and legends of Anmaere.
THE WANTING MARE is written and directed by Nicholas Ashe Bateman, and stars Jordan Monaghan, Yasmin Keshtkar, Edmond Cofie, Nicholas Ashe Bateman, Josh Clark, and Christine Kellogg-Darrin. It is Executive Produced by Lawrence Inglee.
THE WANTING MARE opens nationwide on Friday, February 5th, 2021, and will be accompanied by a half-hour making-of documentary available online.
