Talkies Community Cinema: Wilding

Based on Isabella Tree’s best-selling book by the same title, Wilding tells the story of a young couple, Isabella and Charlie Tree, who in the 1980s inherit Knepp, a failing, four-hundred-year-old estate.

By the end of the 1990s, facts must be faced: the farm isn’t working, and they are £1.5m in debt. The land is dying, the soil reduced to sterile dirt, with plummeting biodiversity levels. Battling entrenched tradition, the couple dares to place the fate of their farm in the hands of nature, with an ambitious rewilding project inspired by the thinking of European ecologists like Frans Vera.

Ripping down the fences, and hoping to renew the growth of mycorrhizal fungi deep in the soil, they set the land back to the wild and entrust its recovery to a motley mix of animals both tame and wild. It is the beginning of a grand experiment that will become one of the most significant rewilding experiments in Europe. Over time, the soil replenishes itself – with a little help from some charming pigs – and the miraculous return of rare species like the purple emperor butterfly, white stork and turtle doves, who make their homes at Knepp. It is a transformation far in excess of anything anyone could have dreamed of, captured in intimate detail by five- time Emmy Award-winning documentarian David Allen and multi- BAFTA & Emmy Award- winning cinematographers Tim Cragg and Simon de Glanville.

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