‘A New Kind of Wilderness’ Director on How She Turned a Living-Off-the-Grid Doc Into an Exquisitely Heartbreaking Story of a Family
variety.comAddie Morfoot Contributor In 2014, filmmaker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen became fascinated with a Norwegian photographer’s blog.
The blogger – Maria Vatne – visually captured how she and her British husband, Nik Payne, raised and home-schooled their four bilingual children off the grid on a Scandinavian farm. “I admired her, as the family represents a lifestyle and mindset that I found inspiring,” says Jacobsen. “(Their lifestyle) wasn’t easy, far from it.
It involved hard work and many battles, but it was a fulfilled life and a rush of freedom in it.” Initially, the director wanted to make a Norwegian television docuseries that captured Vatne and her husband’s unorthodox lifestyle, but that never came to fruition.
For the next few years, the project was put on hold. Then, in 2019, Jacobsen discovered that Vatne had been diagnosed with cervical cancer, which would kill her in less than a year.
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