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Wilding

David Allen

75 mins | 2023

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.

Sponsored by:

Serendipity Books

Serendipity Books
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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.

David Allen

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

WILDING’s MULTI AWARD-WINNING TEAM


Wilding is produced by three-time Oscar-winning production company Passion Pictures; partnered with Oscar-nominated and Emmy and Peabody Award-winning HHMI Tangled Bank Studios whose most recent film All That Breathes won best documentary at Sundance, Cannes and the London Film Festival. This is the third film produced by these two studios, following the Emmy Award- winning film The Serengeti Rules (2018), and the Emmy- nominated documentary My Garden of a Thousand Bees (2021), which won the Golden Panda Award at Wildscreen.


The film is directed by five-time Emmy Award-winning David Allen, and photographed by multi- BAFTA & Emmy Award-winning cinematographers Tim Cragg and Simon de Glanville


Wildling’s musical score, is composed by Biggi Hilmars and Grammy-nominated Jon Hopkins, cited by The New Yorker as “one of the most celebrated electronic musicians of his generation.”

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