A NEW KIND OF WILDERNESS (Sitje Evensmo Jacobsen 2024)

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SILJE EVENSMO JACOBSEN: A NEW KIND OF WILDERNESS

Sweet, intimate film of learning to live in Norway without one parent

A New Kind of Wilderness introduces us to what looks like a self-sustaining hippie family paradise, sort of Captain Fantastic but in Norway and with fewer kids. But tragedy happens, and all the rest is reeling from that. Paradise has to adjust in this low keyed but enthralling film, one of those long-term documentaries that has had to take a quite different turn from where it started out.

Maria Gros Vatne was a Norwegian photographer who supported her English husband Nik and their three handsome young children Freja, Falk and Ulv plus Ronja, Maria's daughter from before, the subjects of this film, on their remote sustainable farm in Norway with her images and her well-known blog, "A new kind of wilderness." But then very suddenly she died of cancer at 41 - and this documentary took its sad, defining new direction. This is the story of how the family lived on.

It's a beautiful little film, full of happiness and love as well as sadness. The only thing it risks is too much sweetness, but that danger is averted because it's real, it's about grieving, and Nik obviously maintains through it all a good English sense of humor. (This film goes back and forth constantly between Norwegian and English.)

Ronja goes to live with her birth father elsewhere, assuring Freja, Falk and Ulv that she still loves them dearly. Nik has to sell the farm they grew up on because he alone cannot earn the money to maintain it without Maria. They move to another farm that he works on where they occupy a house on the property. Nik has to send Freja, Falk and Ulv to a school (it's a dear little one, more like an extended family) three days a week because of work, giving up the goal of entirely home schooling them.

These are the main changes. But Nike and the his three offspring also spend time in England with his family family for a while. He would like to move back there. He isn't confident of his qualification to home school the kids in Norwegian on his own and he admits he feels "like an alien" in Norway now. But he comes to realize that even without Maria they are nonetheless still settled in Norway and it's where the kids have lived all their lives and want to be, even if they also speak fluent English.

This is always a story about grief. Maria had been the warm center of things (as well as its income source). But the children (they as well as Maria and Nik are heard from in judiciously introduced voiceover moments) learn that grief doesn't go on the same forever as they thought at first. It's probably easier for them to move on from it than their father. This is visably hinted when they go for a visit to the woodland cemetery where Maria is buried, and the kids seem to have finished their visit before he is quite ready to leave.

Sad or happy, there is something idyllic about the kindness and cooperation of the family, which somehow may feel related to the fact that their world and they themselves never stop being beautiful to look at.

When you make your little family a whole universe in nature and one of the parents dies it may be more devastating than if you'd lived in an urban community that could support you all the time. But throughout the film we are constantly learning why this family was established the way it was, how well it functions. It is striking when Nik slaughters a steer and breaks it down the way the kids are there, observant, supportive. True, Freja has to look away, but this is a reality of farming they're on board for.

Ronja moves away to study nursing. But we don't really know what happens after this. Nik is brave to guarantee his three children a growing up in Norway. But he also does it for Maria and for the ideal they both lived for. An essential element of A New Kind of Wilderness is its depiction of how when it has been strong enough, commitment lives on in a couple even after one of them is gone.

One of the year's best documentaries and listed as a leading Oscar contender on Gold Derby.

A New Kind of Wilderness, 84 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2024, winning the grand jury documentary prize there, and showing also at over a dozen other festivals. It releases in theaters Oct. 25, 2024. Metacritic rating: 70%.