‘The grief takes your breath away': how death transformed a loving family – and shaped a remarkable film

The Guardian

15-04-2025

Peace hangs over a farm in rural Norway. The last of the melting snow lingers in hummocks and bikes are strewn outside the Payne family's small rented cottage. Nik Payne materialises from behind the barn where he has been feeding the cows. One of his three children, Falk, 12, is lying on the sofa with a fever and a Biggles novel; later, Freja, 15, and Ulv, nine (known as Wolf or Wolfie), return from school. Their home is as warm and chaotic as any family's – boots and coats strewn in the hallway, a fridge covered in photos, shelves of books – but with a few differences: there is no television and behind the living room door is an unobtrusive, very personal shrine.
The Paynes find themselves the reluctant stars of a film, A New Kind of Wilderness, which has won awards at Sundance and other festivals around the world. This documentary begins, deceptively, as Variety put it, 'like Swiss Family Robinson updated for the era of Instagram cottagecore'. The children, with their older half-sister Ronja, are being raised by Nik, an Englishman, and his Norwegian wife Maria to be 'wild and free': home-schooled, creative, growing their own food, living closely and gently with nature.
Then tragedy strikes. In 2019, Maria falls ill with cancer and dies, aged 41. With sensitivity and intimacy, film-maker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen follows what happens next as the grief-stricken Nik tries to stay true to the beliefs and daily patterns of living he created with Maria, home schooling his bereft children and trying to protect his family. I defy anyone to watch it dry-eyed.
Now the Paynes are travelling the world, attending Q&As at film festivals where the documentary has been rapturously received. At their first festival, they all watched the film again with the audience. 'That was a mistake, because it still affects us in many ways and we're fighting back the tears,' says Nik. 'Now we sometimes go in for the last 10 minutes.' Is it traumatic to relive their tragedy? 'I see it as good, a cathartic process, bringing it up again,' he says. 'Grief is an ongoing thing. Grief changes you for ever. It's part of you for ever but it's not the defining part.'
The film is so intensely moving perhaps because the people at its heart are not showy or spectacular. Nik, who makes yoghurt and bakes bread as we chat in his kitchen, is a private, deep-thinking man who radiates self-sufficiency. Watching him grieve on film is agonising.
'At the start, the grief takes your breath away. You're left gasping for the next breath. The only thing you can do is just breathe. It's the contemplation of having to endure things for a long time that becomes unbearable, not the thing itself,' he says. 'It was so important for me that I had the kids. You haven't any choice but to get up. It's impossible to be miserable all the time because they come up with spontaneous joy. They are in their grief in a different way, for shorter periods. They don't sit in it, like we do.'
He and Maria met through a mutual friend when Nik, who had grown up on a dairy farm near Chester, worked as a flying instructor in Portugal. 'We really hit it off,' he says. Soon after, he visited her in Norway. 'Within six weeks, I'd moved over.' Maria's daughter from an earlier relationship, Ronja, was four at the time, and the three of them chose to live in the countryside; 364 days after Nik moved to Norway, Freja was born. They bought a smallholding and Maria taught photography and film-making, and then started a blog about their life. 'I was the one who did the farm and grew the food,' says Nik.
Jacobsen saw Maria's blog and in 2014 made a pilot film about the family living close to nature. No broadcasters picked it up, but when Jacobsen got back in touch after Maria's death, Nik decided to let her into the family's shattered life because Maria would have wanted it. 'For me, it was a completely unnatural thing. Maria was more extroverted, more into film-making, and had wanted to start this project,' he says. 'In her blog, she shared everything about our lives – the good stuff but also the hard stuff, including her own illness. She was very honest, so I decided to go for it as a kind of legacy for her. Maybe it will help someone out there.'
What emerges is a series of dilemmas as harsh reality challenges Nik's pure ideals, particularly his quest for self-sufficiency and a creative education for his children. In the absence of Maria, he tries so hard to provide everything for them: he grows food, cooks, brushes Wolfie's long blond hair and teaches them at home even when he knows his Norwegian is not quite up to scratch. But he must also earn a living. Did he reach a point where he was overwhelmed by trying to do it all? 'Probably every day, and then I had to start again the next day. That's why I had to send them to school.'
This is a climactic moment in the film. Did sending them to school feel like a defeat? Or doing the right thing? 'It's a continuous feeling of defeat or disappointment. They really did enjoy the home schooling and they would have liked to continue. I had hoped that I could give them that, but I couldn't see a way to do it.'
Despite their initial fears, the children settle into mainstream education, although this forces another uncomfortable confrontation with reality when Freja brings home a school iPad (all Norwegian children are issued them). Many tech-sceptic parents will recognise the grimace on Nik's face when his children huddle round the iPad in rapture as Freja plays a game.
It's heartbreaking how alone Nik appears at this time. He had some counselling while Maria was dying but it was halted rather abruptly and, as stubbornly self-reliant as ever, Nik vowed to become his own therapist. 'Maria always talked about 'doing the inner work'. For years, I didn't know what she was talking about, but I started to, slowly but surely.' What about friends? Talking wouldn't have helped, he says. 'I was just alone. It's the loneliness of the last speaker of a dead language. That's how I felt.'
It was sometimes comforting having the film-maker in their home. 'Silje was very good – she came and hung out with us without filming and became a friend I could talk to off camera,' he says. But Nik worried about exposing the children. 'She wanted to film how Freja was feeling, and I had to put my foot down and say, 'I don't want you to do any more now.' There's a scene where Freja has read a letter from Ronja and I came in because I just wanted to check Freja was all right. Often I'd be hiding outside the bedroom if she was being talked to by Silje, just to …' He tails off. 'We all enjoyed having Silje around most of the time, but there were definitely times when it was, 'Ohhhft, I could do without that.''
Being filmed selling their dream farm was one of those moments. Nik's labouring and tree surgery couldn't pay their mortgage. All this pain is leavened by beauty and humour, much of the latter provided by Wolf. When Falk mourns their farm for having everything, Wolfie chips in: 'But not pet whales.'
While Freja and Falk are cautious and thoughtful, like their dad, Wolfie is a bundle of energy, arriving home from school on his bike like a whirlwind before performing multiple somersaults on the trampoline.
'You need some comedic relief in a movie like that, I think,' says Freja of her little brother, who has, according to Nik, 'been eating his weight in pancakes and jam' at festival hotel buffets. 'The fun part [of the festivals] is when they call up your name if you've won something,' says Wolfie, who points to a gold starfish-shaped gong from Egypt and another award from Hungary on their windowsill. The film has been shown on Norwegian television and is now being released in Japan, where their chic Nordic knitwear (all knitted by Granny – Maria's mother) has proved particularly popular.
For much of the two years Silje filmed the family, Nik assumed that if the project was ever finished it would play at some obscure eastern European film festival 'watched by three people, one of whom is asleep'. He first saw it at home by himself and 'blubbed all the way through. It was difficult to be objective, to see what sort of film it really is, but I was happy there wasn't anything in there I couldn't stand behind.' He had no clue it would be so well received until Sundance, when the audience whooped and whistled, giving a standing ovation when they realised the family were in the auditorium.
At home, the Sundance world cinema grand jury prize is placed in the shrine beside Maria's photograph, plus two peacock feathers and other precious objects they remember her by. Maria would be so delighted by the award, thinks Nik. 'She studied film and some of the guys that she studied with have said she dreamed of winning something at Sundance.'
They still remember Maria at dinner. 'We light a candle before each meal and hold hands. We're not religious as such but we give thanks for the food, the day we've had and each other, and we send love up to Maria,' says Nik.
The Paynes are perhaps closer than many families – with more chat at mealtimes – but they don't want to be defined by their grief. Freja is happy at school; Nik rolls his eyes about her smartphone-time but she also raises and sells chickens for pocket money. Nik hopes to home-school Falk and Wolf again for a year before they start secondary. He is also writing a book about his experiences and aiming to buy a modest smallholding to pursue farming and self-sufficiency. The film may be successful but documentaries don't tend to make much money; Nik says he hasn't received any revenue from it. 'I'm fortunate enough not to be a money-oriented person. I would actually feel uncomfortable if I was making money out of that. I like the fact that it's something I can give.'
In the film, Nik shrugs off his dad's suggestion that he find a new partner, but now says he enjoyed a brief relationship last year – 'It was good to realise that I'm still alive' – before realising they had different visions for their lives. Does he feel lonely? He pauses for a longer-than-usual thought. 'Sometimes, maybe. I'm somebody who is naturally good with his own company. I read a lot, I think a lot, there are plenty of people around I can talk to, if I want to. Sometimes, at dinner time when the kids are bickering or talking about fart humour, I think, oh God, I wish there was an adult to talk to.'
The children aren't having that.
'No!' says Wolf. 'He wants to talk about farts. We don't.'
'It's like being at a chimpanzee's tea party with him,' says Freja, and the sunny Norwegian spring day is brightened by their laughter.
A New Kind of Wilderness is out on 16 May. The Paynes will be at select cinemas around the UK for Q&As at preview screenings. Find one near you here