Wilding main backdrop
Wilding main poster

7.0/10 • 4

2024-06-141h 15m

Documentary

The return of nature to a British farm.

A young couple battle entrenched tradition and hostile forces to bet on nature for the future of their failing, four-hundred-year-old estate. Ripping down the fences, they set the land back to the wild and entrust its recovery to a motley mix of animals both tame and wild, beginning a grand experiment.

Directors
David Allen

Top Billed Cast

View Credits
  1. Isabella Tree

    Isabella Tree

    Self

  2. Rhiannon Hughes

    Rhiannon Hughes

    Isabella Tree

  3. Matthew Collyer

    Matthew Collyer

    Self

  4. Charlie Burrell

    Charlie Burrell

    Self

Reviews1

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CinemaSerf Avatar

CinemaSerf

Jun 17, 2024

7/10

There's something quite fascinating about the recuperative ability of the land to recover from centuries of man's abuse displayed in this documentary. Isabella Tree and husband Charlie have inherited a country estate that can barely manage to grow weeds. The soil is knackered and desperate action is required. They hit on the fairly radical idea of abandoning the place to nature (except their front lawn!) and the film now follows the reclamation of this space by birds, bugs, deer, pigs, cattle - creatures that would have roamed the land freely a few hundred years ago. They even bring in storks! It's a stunning piece of photography to look at, but the underlying narrative is really quite weak and I found it allowed sentiment to overrule the one thing it fails to address - scalability. They live in a castle with no evident money worries. None that we are told about, anyway. So this looks like a worthy pet project that though laudable and impressive will, as one of their neighbours raises at a meeting, not feed the nation. When the vast majority of these complementary farming techniques were in use, the population of the UK was probably less than 10% of what it is now; malnutrition and starvation were rife and distribution methods, without refrigeration, left the food supply subject to the vagaries of the weather. What this doesn't address in any way is just how this method of nurturing the land is going to provide for an hungry population. It's largely presented by Isabella Tree herself, and she is an engaging individual but one who presents the most complex of arguments in far too simple a fashion - as if it were a lecture on the relative merits of organic methods without addressing in any way their limitations of their practicalities or economics. "Duncan" the horse and a few of the pigs have some great fun at a charity polo match and it is a very watchable film - but a little too light and fluffy.

Media

  • Wilding backdrop

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Status
Released
Original Language
English
Budget
--
Revenue
--
Keywords
farmbased on novel or booknatureenvironmentnatural habitatland restoration