Audiences Are Applauding Amazon’s ‘Wildcat’ For Tackling Mental Illness Head-On – Contenders Documentary
deadline.comThe stars of the Amazon Studios documentary Wildcat are a man, a woman and an orphaned baby jungle cat they live with in a rainforest in Peru.
The subject of this first feature from a filmmaking couple based in Virginia is something more: how to survive psychological damage and suicidal depression to find peace and a place in the world.
One half of the duo that made Wildcat, Melissa Lesh, wondered about the reception for a film that sounds easy to root for at first pass— because who doesn’t love people taking care of kittens? — and then digs into difficult topics including mental illness, despair and self harm. RELATED: The Contenders Documentary – Deadline’s Full Coverage “It’s scary to put something like this out in the world and not know how it will land,” Lesh said at Deadline’s Contenders Documentary event, alongside her partner and fellow Wildcat director-producer, Trevor Beck Frost.
Wildcat follows a scarred British war veteran, Harry Turner, and an American wildlife biologist, Samantha Zwicker, who are living in a remote Amazon rainforest in Peru and raising abandoned ocelots — spotted, leopard-like jungle cats — which they hope to re-release into the wilderness.
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