Tales from the Heart
75 mins | 2023
David Allen
Wilding
Based on Isabella Tree’s best-selling book by the same title, “Wilding” tells the story of a young couple that bets on nature for the future of their failing, four-hundred-year-old estate.
About
Based on Isabella Tree’s best-selling book by the same title, Wilding tells the story of a young couple, Isabella and Charlie Tree, who in the 1980s inherit Knepp, a failing, four-hundred-year-old estate. By the end of the 1990s, facts must be faced: the farm wasn’t working, and they were £1.5m in debt. The land is dying, the soil reduced to sterile dirt, with plummeting biodiversity levels. Battling entrenched tradition, the couple dares to place the fate of their farm in the hands of nature, with an ambitious rewilding project inspired by the thinking of European ecologists like Frans Vera.
Ripping down the fences and hoping to renew the growth of mycorrhizal fungi deep in the soil, they set the land back to the wild and entrust its recovery to a motley mix of animals both tame and wild. It is the beginning of a grand experiment that will become one of the most significant rewilding experiments in Europe. Over time, the soil replenishes itself – with a little help from some charming pigs – and the miraculous return of rare species like the purple emperor butterfly, white stork and turtle doves, who make their homes at Knepp. It is a transformation far in excess of anything anyone could have dreamed of, captured in intimate detail by five-time Emmy Award-winning documentarian David Allen and multi- BAFTA & Emmy Award-winning cinematographers Tim Cragg and Simon de Glanville.
FILMMAKER BIO
David Allen
At Passion Planet, David Allen masterminds an award-winning film department focusing on natural history and factual output across both television and theatrical release documentaries. With five Emmys and twelve Wildscreen Pandas to his name, David is recognized as one of the leading independent producers/directors in his field. His production for BBC, My Life as a Turkey, was described by The Times, “as probably the best documentary of the year” and won Wildscreen’s coveted “Best of Festival” Golden Panda. More recent productions include landmark conservation series such as Earth: A New Wild & H20: The Molecule that Made Us. Recently David produced the Emmy Award-winning feature documentary The Serengeti Rules and a lockdown-authored film My Garden of a Thousand Bees, which opened the 40th anniversary year of the PBS series Nature and won David his second Golden Panda at Wildscreen.
CREDITS
Director
David Allen
Writer
David Allen
Producer
Gaby Bastyra
Editor
Mark Fletcher
Editor (additional editing)
Christopher Gent
Executive Producer
David Guy Elisco
Executive Producer
Sean B. Carroll
Composer
Jon Hopkins
Composer
Biggi Hilmars
Key Cast
Isabella Tree
Key Cast
Charlie Burrell