A New Kind of Wilderness review – beautiful film of off-grid family shattered by bereavement

When photographer Maria Vatne died in 2019, her family had to come to terms with not just the loss of a parent but a whole lifestyle, including their homeThis sad and beautiful documentary from Norwegian film-maker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen tells a painful, complicated story, more complicated than even the film itself explicitly reveals. It’s a story that the director appeared to have chanced upon through following the blog of a brilliant photographer, Maria Vatne, who recorded her idyllic wilderness existence living on a farm in Norway with her British husband Nik Payne and their three home-schooled children, Ulv, Falk, and Freja, and an elder daughter Ronja, from Maria’s previous partner. But one blogpost from October 2018, titled A New Kind of Wilderness revealed that she had cervical cancer, and she died in 2019.The film shows us the family coming to terms with their terrible loss and grief, particularly Nik. For a start, they can no longer live on their beloved farm because without Maria’s photography income Nik cannot keep up the mortgage repayments; they must move to a much smaller place and the kids will go to regular school. (So their former existence was not, in fact, as “off-grid” as all that; Maria’s website reveals that she took photography assignments and the idyllic farm images perhaps functioned in a way as a shopwindow.) The film allows us to wonder if Nik’s emotional wretchedness is subtly complicated by feelings of self-reproach as a breadwinner. Also, he ponders taking the children home to England where his relatives have a farm, but the children would find that insupportable and it might be the ultimate disloyalty to Maria. Continue reading...

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