In 2016, American director Matt Ross wowed the Sundance crowd with his drama Captain Fantastic, about a widower and his children adapting to civilization after spending years off the grid, in accordance with the family’s left-wing anarchist leanings. Eight years later, a similar premise is at the core of the Norwegian documentary A New Kind of Wilderness (the original title Ukjent landskap translates as “unknown landscape), playing at the festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. A logical starting point for a film whose emotional through line will most likely grant it a fruitful career on the festival circuit, relating particularly to those focusing on the documentary form or youth-related topics.
Although not mentioned on screen, the starting point for the project was when filmmaker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen came across the Payne family’s website, run by the mother Maria: a visual and verbal chronicle of life on a farm, which Maria and her English husband Nik bought so they could live as close to nature as possible, without relying on the trappings of big city routines. They homeschooled their four children (the eldest, Ronja, is Maria’s daughter from a previous relationship) and were perfectly happy in the middle of a Norwegian forest, a feeling Jacobsen wished to capture on camera.
However, as filming got postponed, she didn’t reconnect with the family until it was too late: Maria was diagnosed with cancer (the film’s English title derives from the online post she used to announce it), and passed away in the first half of 2019. With the consent of Nik and the children, she retooled her original idea to focus on their adjustment to a new life and its multiple complications: Ronja, who always felt a bit distant from the rest of the family anyway by virtue of not being Nik’s child, moved back in with her biological father, and Nik himself contemplated moving back to England, especially since Maria’s absence made it difficult to continue homeschooling the younger children Ulv, Falk and Freja in Norwegian.
The film begins with the idyllic feeling amped up, indulging all the hippie clichés of the family’s chosen lifestyle (one minute in, one of the kids is encouraged to literally hug a tree). Then the euphoria gradually subsides until very soon Maria is out of the picture – barring occasional archive footage and passages from her writings recited by Siw Laurent – and a more somber tone kicks in. The lush vistas of farm life give way to more frequent close-ups of the main players, particularly the children who find themselves “trapped” in a new, more restrictive existence they didn’t know was around the corner.
There’s a gentle rawness to the proceedings, as the trust the director built up with the family pays off in her having access to their more vulnerable moments, with an underlying melancholy even as the overall structure lays the groundwork for a fairly uplifting series of character arcs. Yes, this is non-fiction, but with the layout of a classic drama (perhaps also because of the partial similarities with the aforementioned Captain Fantastic), including the occasional intrusive contrivances – voiceovers especially – that aim to tug at the heartstrings in an even more explicit way. A minor, but not entirely harmless annoyance in what is otherwise a very honest look at a broken family putting itself back together.
Director, screenplay: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen
Producer: Mari Bakke Riise
Editing: Christoffer Heie, Kristian Tveit
Music: Olav Øyehaug
Production company: A5film
World Sales: Kim Christensen, Nanna Lykke (DR Sales, Denmark)
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema Documentary Competition)
In Norwegian, English
83 minutes
