A New Kind of Wilderness

Silje Evensmo Jacobsen's 2024 Norwegian documentary follows a family living by their own rules in a forest. Maria and Nik do not send their four children to school, grow their own food and stay away from screens. Maria documents this life on a blog. That blog is also the film's starting point; the director found the family through it. Then Maria develops cancer and dies. The documentary's real subject is what follows: whether the father and four children left behind can sustain the arrangement she built. They cannot. The children start school, the family moves to town and a chosen life becomes an enforced adjustment. The film watches that transition without judging; it neither romanticises the old life nor treats the new one as rescue. It won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary section at Sundance. Who it's for: those who like family documentaries and accounts of alternative ways of living. Who it's not for: viewers who do not want to approach grief and children coping with loss.