Melbourne International Film Festival Review - A New Kind of Wilderness

 

“School comes at the expense of the wildness and playfulness inherent in all of us.”

Beautiful, natural and familial, A New Kind of Wilderness is a tender bilingual documentary that probes gently at the grief found in a family following the death of their mother, as they strive to continue living towards her humble, simplistic ideals of self-dependence and interconnection, that’s reserved yet intimate in its patient portrait.

Discussion Points:

A New Kind of Wilderness is not the film that director Silje Evensmo Jacobsen initially intended to make. What began in 2014 as a portrait of a bilingual Norwegian-British family abandoning social norms to live off-the-grid, changed dramatically following Maria Vatne’s untimely death in 2019, to study the challenges of Nik Payne maintaining those ideals as a single-parent household burdened with grief. This real life ‘Captain Fantastic’ is a heartfelt, beautiful, tender, gentle and intimate tribute and portrait that probes softly and deeply to chronicle a family that have forgone many of cultures regular support structures and are left to find strength within their family unit. Shot so privately and personally, Jacobsen is a true fly on the wall, capturing real human moments of earnest and sensitive emotion. Her camera never invades or intrudes into the intimate instances it captures. It’s so profoundly beautiful and heart wrenchingly powerful to watch Nik as a father and widow navigate parenthood and grief, and his children explore their coming-of-age in a mixture of lifestyles and locations. A film that is jointly about dislocation and belonging, loneliness and home. Very touching and special.