Kent and Wonder discuss the documentary, A New Kind of Wildnerness, about a father shepherding his young children through a terrible loss. Emerging themes include death from illness (cancer), grief and loss, family, fatherhood, siblings vs step-siblings, raising young children, ancestry, and homeland. Astrologically Wonder and Kent relate these themes to the 4th, 8th and 12th houses, along with the 3rd.
Distribution: Currently on Theatrical Run, more info
Director: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen
Run Time: 83 minutes
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.479] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories. This season, we're looking at Sundance 2024, and today we're starting a new section. It's the first of six on a section we're calling Family, Land, and Ancestors. So we're kicking it off with a film called A New Kind of Wilderness, which was a part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition. In fact, it actually won the Grand Jury Prize for the World Cinema and Documentary. So this is a piece by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen, and, Wonder, I’m wondering if you could read the synopsis for us.
[00:00:49.508] Wonder Bright: A New Kind of Wilderness. In a forest in Norway, a family lives an isolated lifestyle in an attempt to be wild and free. But a tragic event changes everything, and they are forced to adjust to modern society. Silje Evansmo Jacobsen's portrait of the Payne family is an intimate encounter with a family coming to terms with a new reality. For years, the family of six enjoyed a slower-paced, independent life in harmony with nature on a picturesque farm. Now they are at a turning point, and Jakobson captures their journey with a caring eye. The vulnerability and compassion they extend to each other, the land, and their animals are tenderly and beautifully observed by a camera that feels part of the family, while home videos woven throughout provide meaningful insights into years past. Joyous moments spring through the heartache, and the Payne’s strong bond and love for each other guide them through each challenge they face. Jakobson crafts a sensitive, affectionate, and completely heartfelt experience that is as much about navigating grief as it is about graciously accepting change. And that synopsis comes to us by way of Sundance programmer, Stephanie Owens.
[00:02:04.248] Kent Bye: Yeah, just even hearing you read through that recap, it just makes my heart sink into the type of grief and empathy that I had watching this piece. And maybe it's worth us talking a little bit more about this story because the way that synopsis is written, it was a little bit of a mystery as to what that sudden tragedy was. It happens within the first five or ten minutes, so if you want to stop now and wait to you have a chance to see the film and come back, then now's a good time to do that, but within that first few minutes we learn that the mother has passed away, this mother who is part of this Norwegian family, they are living on the land, she's living with her husband and they are homeschooling all their kids, and you just have this kind of idyllic lifestyle and she was a photographer, a professional photographer, so you see these amazing photos of her children through different phases of their life. But she also had recorded quite a lot of home videos and narrated quite a bit. What was extremely striking to me about this piece was just how much of the narrative thread was coming back to the mother's voice, Maria, who had passed away. And you get to hear her own first-person experiences kind of woven throughout the film in a way that - I found it quite moving, I was crying so much throughout the entirety of this piece. I found it deeply, deeply moving. So yeah, that's some of my first impressions. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and we can continue to kind of break it down.
[00:03:33.298] Wonder Bright: It is a really tender, beautiful story. I was also really struck by the way that the film, although the breadth of the story is centered around the mother's absence, we actually first come to the mother's absence because we meet the family through her. So, as you point out, there's so many beautiful photographs that Maria Payne took of the family and so much wonderful footage, video footage of her speaking. So the whole opening sequence of the film is video footage and photographs that Maria Payne took of her family where she introduces all of the people that we grow to completely love throughout the course of the film. And it's this really evocative, poignant sequence that sets us up to understand what a force of nature she herself was, and what a visionary she was and how she was really able to be a kind of centrifugal force of the family in a way that had a real commitment to what she wanted to create in creating family with her partner, Nick. And it's also worth pointing out that she herself is natively Norwegian, and her partner, Nick, is English. So when she leaves, he is a stranger in a strange land. And she was the anchor point for him, not just in terms of providing this strong vision for their family, and the idea of living on the land and her commitment to that, and the execution of it, but also in terms of, you know, Norwegian is still a second language for him. And in addition to that, she was the primary breadwinner because she made enough of an income with her photography to be able to subsidize their life living on this small farm in Norway. And once she's gone, he faces, as a lot of people face in the death of a loved one, that in addition to the grief of losing the love of his life, his financial status is also upended. And now he's responsible for taking care of their three children in a way that means that the grief over the loss of Maria is compounded by the fact that he can't continue the vision that they started their family with. So there's just so many themes of loss around this. And yet underneath it all, there's this extraordinary story that I think Stephanie Owens' synopsis really manages of capture of this family trying to create a new life for itself. And Nick is our hero in that journey. So as much as this is a story about the loss of a mother, and the loss of this strong visionary, who sort of spearheaded this unique idea of, like, where this family should be. The story as it unfolds is really about the father creating his own vision for his family, and coming to know himself as the centrifugal force of this family, and being able to carve out his own relationship to this foreign land, and to what family means for him now that the love of his life has gone.
[00:06:58.041] Kent Bye: Yeah, a lot of clear articulation of a lot of the main themes. I think, for me, some of the primary significations are that grief and sorrow. There's a lot of Saturn signatures of loss and grief, but also a lot of 12th House signatures that you were talking about in terms of just the sorrows in that grief, but also the stranger in a strange land being English himself and being in a Norway. He's got three kids and then one step kid. Is that right?
[00:07:25.373] Wonder Bright: Yes. Maria had an older daughter who lived with them until she died. So we also follow that daughter's journey. You know, once her mother dies, she opts to leave Nick and her three step-siblings and moves back in with her biological father. And so there's this aching space of like, what does family mean to her now? Where does she belong? She doesn't have the same relationship to her stepdad that her step-siblings have, obviously. I think she was at least five or six when Nick comes into view. So everybody in this film is really struggling to identify what family means and who is family.
[00:08:13.261] Kent Bye: Yeah, the main theme of the section of Family, Land and Ancestors. So there's certainly a strong theme of family in this film, but also the land because they're so intimately connected to the land and the way that the story is playing out. And the ancestors connection where Nick's father is still in the United Kingdom, like if it were up to him, it would be a lot easier for him to just uproot everybody and move to the United Kingdom. But there's a promise that he made to Maria to stick it out in Norway and to have their kids grow up in Norway. And also to the best of his ability, he wanted to maintain this homeschooling commitment that they had for their kids, but because he's not a native Norwegian speaker, it was becoming difficult. Also, he has to go back to work. And so he's got to make these changes that come about from putting the kids into school and then going to work, but also still trying to maintain his connection to the kids. And you have this dynamic where the kids were very much connected to the land in their spare time, but yet when they go off and go to school, they have these new dynamics of both the introduction of technology as a primary mode of communication and how that is changing the family dynamics. but also this desire to be connected to friends where originally they were only committing to, like, three days a week of the school and then having the other two days at home school but as time goes on there's increasing pull towards the children wanting to be connected to their friends and not miss out on this or that. But I'd say the other major theme that I think this film is really diving into is the 3rd House sibling relationships with Ronja and her other siblings, where by choosing to go live with her father, she has to be away from her half-sister and half-brothers that she is not able to be directly in contact with. So you see a lot of the connection between the stepsisters and siblings in this film that I think is also a big theme in terms of maintaining those sibling relationships.
[00:10:09.369] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I chose this film to kick off this section about family land and ancestors because it's one of the smaller stories that Sundance offered us this year. And by that, I mean that it's a very specific story that is unique to this particular family. But like a lot of times when we have a really small story, the themes are so universal. And so it felt like this was a really good way to center conversations about what it is to have a family. And so often we don't know how much something means to us until we lose what we thought it was. And to lose a parent or a partner is one of the most primal pains that I think can be universally understood. And because we have time in this film to really unpack how that one event impacts this family across the board, it really allows us to sink into the compassion that we can experience for one another, and the resonance that we all have for one another. So the idea of fatherhood, the idea of motherhood, is so embodied in these two intrepid people who have just forged this vision of an idyllic family life. And to watch the father struggle to create a vision for family that in so many ways has to go in opposition of how Maria ever wanted it to be. And he really has to struggle to create his own vision, even though sometimes he feels guilty because he's not doing it the way that Maria wanted to. But he just he can't, you know. And she's not there anymore. So he has to do the best that he can do and try to reconcile himself with that. And he's just so brave. They're all so beautiful and so full hearted and give such clear voice to their missing of their mom. And what a wonderful human being she was, you know. She died of cancer. And we learn that in the first five minutes. We see her shaved head. We see, I think it's her medicine bag attached to her body. And so for obvious reasons, because I have just recently had a diagnosis of cancer, there were things about this film that just really landed for you and I. I think this was the first film that we watched where I remember you closing your laptop and not taking any notes and just cuddling up next to me and we just held hands and really watched the film. And I found it really heartening. We looked up Maria's blog later and one of the lines that she says in a blog post she wrote post her diagnosis, something to the effect that her illness is not a blessing, but it does provide gifts. And I feel like Jacobsen and her beautiful cast, perhaps Nick especially, were able to do justice to Maria's words there. And they were able to provide me personally with a gift in the telling of this story and in sharing their lives so openly. It's a really, really special film.
[00:14:07.748] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Just as you are talking about it and I'm remembering the film, I think it lands in a way that just, you know, is just deeply personal because you titled this section, Family, Land and Ancestors, and I had said that the ancestors connected to like Nick's father, but in some ways, Maria becomes an ancestor throughout the course of this film. And so you see the family and their connection to the land, but then you, you feel the presence of, um, of Maria throughout this piece, not only through the memories and the grief and the emotions of the main characters of Nick and his family, but she is kind of resurrected from the dead in some ways to hear her voice narrate certain moments that she had recorded, that gets seamlessly woven throughout the course of this piece. It's like a jolt of hearing what she had said, but in a context now that she has passed. And I think anytime when someone passes away, looking back on things - that carries a new meaning or context. So there's this juxtaposition of her saying that in the moment when it was recorded, but now it's also juxtapose into everything else that's happened with her family's life as she's now in this role of this ancestor that is speaking this. Like I said, I found it deeply moving. And every time I think about the film, there's tears that come to my eyes because it was just profoundly moving the way that they told the story. And how it connected to our own situation that we're also going through. But I'm just really also glad that the jurors also agreed with that and awarding it the Grand Jury Prize. There's always lots of really strong stories in the selection, but I feel like this is a very apt film to take home that award because I do think there's something special to learn from this everyday experience of what it means to be human in this family context. And You know, like you said, it's a very small story, but it's also a very universal story, which I think is why it can resonate with so many people.
[00:16:16.584] Wonder Bright: Yeah. Yeah. It was so clear to me when I created this category that I wanted this one to be the first one. And, as I'm listening to you speak, I'm also thinking how much it feels in this moment to be something that could have belonged to the first category in terms of strategies for resilience in dealing with difficult circumstances. I think between the director and the adult protagonist in the film, that we really have this powerful testimony to the experience of testimony, to the experience of saying what's at stake for you, which harkens back to some of the things that we talked about around the film Sugarcane in our second episode, in the first episode of the first section, which just has to do with bearing witness, you know, and the importance of that. And the way that the father takes the children to their mother's grave and they talk about her, and they read letters to her, and cards to her on her birthday, and burn them on the fire. And all the ways that they call her into their lives as they move forward with them.
[00:17:47.298] Kent Bye: Yeah, so who would you prescribe this film to?
[00:17:51.590] Wonder Bright: To me this is a film about the 4th House. This is a film that is a deeply personal testimony for the experience of home, land and ancestors, and what it means to have all of those things, and to be able to name them, and to move forward in a state of honoring them with your full intentions. And it's a really beautiful testimony to those things.
[00:18:25.784] Kent Bye: Yeah. And as I think about what I'm bearing witness to in this film, I'm thinking about how there's a 7th House relationship between Nick and Maria, where they've created this context of their life and living on the farm and being in relationship to each other, but also having a clear vision for what they wanted to create for their family in terms of the way that they wanted to be in relationship to their kids, and once Maria passes then everything has to change and Nick has to adapt and get a job and a lot of those ideals that they had when they were both together as a partnership has to go through some necessary changes for them to continue to be in Norway. But just to bear witness to both their relationship, and their commitment, and their vision for what they created for the family, and that Nick is the one who is asked to carry forth that vision that they had created together, and all the ways that he tries to maintain that integrity towards that vision, but also ways that he has to adapt given the given circumstances. We get to hear Maria's voice throughout after she's gone. And so the fact that she had recorded all these incredible photos and recorded these little dispatches and just how the director Jacobsen was able to kind of weave it all together in such a seamless way. So yeah, that's I guess what I'm bearing witness to.
[00:19:47.819] Wonder Bright: Yeah. Well, I want to bear witness to Maria's vision of family and the way in which her family continues to flourish from the starting point of that vision that she shared with her husband, Nick, and the ways in which Nick is living into it and the family is living into it. and how Jacobsen was able to reflect that back to them, but also to us so that we could share in it. It's a really beautiful vision.
[00:20:29.912] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, that's all that we have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the story all the way down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider signing up for the newsletter at story all the way down.com to be able to keep up to date for what we're doing next and how you might be able to support us in the future. So thanks again for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
