Eccentric ecological warriors worry traditional green and pleasant land tillers and livestock farmers in WILDING, a barmy balm for those fretting over fertilzer and the rape of the planet.
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. She and Charlie battle entrenched tradition and dare to place the fate of their farm in the hands of nature. Ripping down the fences, they set the land back to the wild and entrust its recovery to a motley mix of animals, both tame and wild.
Charlie and Isabella inherited the Knepp estate from his grandparents in the 1980s. And it was 3500 acres of intensive arable and dairy. Knepp was already a failing farm, business-wise, it wasn’t profitable. But Charlie thought he could make it work. So for 17 years, he tried to farm it. But after 17 years, in about 1999, he realised that they were one and a half million pounds in debt, and it was just not viable. So the couple looked at how they could use the estate radically differently, working with the land rather than pushing against it.
And so the beginning of a grand experiment that became one of the most significant rewilding experiments in Europe, reversing a silent spring into glorious summer of soil turned by truffleing snouts warmed by worms and the return of turtledoves. Nature sows with sows, making a silk purse of rich soil from nutrient depleted dirt.
For seventy-eight minutes we are treated to a beautiful array of nature shots with deer and dear little pigs and a rambunctious pony named Duncan. He likes to have a deer does Duncan!
WILDING documents a transformation far in excess of anything the couple could have dreamed of, captured in quant intimate detail by fivetime Emmy Award-winning documentarian David Allen and multi- BAFTA & Emmy Awardwinning cinematographers Tim Cragg and Simon de Glanville.
Go wild!
