“My Shooting Process Involved a Mix of Planned Setups and Spontaneous Captures...”: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen on Her Sundance-debuting A New Kind of Wilderness

Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind of Wilderness is a film structured in a way I’ve not seen before. With a title that likewise could apply to the psychic space into which the audience is thrust, the rural Norway-set doc is an intimate, first-person narrated, cinematic essay from a director whose story it is not. Indeed, straight from its bold opening, the viewer is left abruptly disoriented, forever second-guessing whose eyes we are actually looking through. It’s a deft structural feat that in turn emotionally transports us into the shoes of the free-spirited, forest-dwelling – and above all grieving – Payne family, five protagonists deeply connected both to one another and to nature; who are unexpectedly forced to find their own individual footing in a brand new dizzying world. Just prior to the film’s Sundance debut (January 19th in the World Cinema Documentary Competition), Filmmaker reached out to the award-winning Norwegian director to learn all about her multiyear voyage into the beautiful unknown.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.