Latest news with #SiljeJacobsen
Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
A New Kind of Wilderness review — off-grid family grief in Norway
With a structure, characters and dramatic tension that echo the Oscar-nominated Viggo Mortensen movie Captain Fantastic, this tear-jerking documentary tells the story of an Englishman, Nik Payne, who in 2014 with his Norwegian wife, Maria, and their four children abandoned civilisation for the off-grid bliss of a remote farm in Norway's northern woods. Five years later, however, Maria died of cancer, and Nik honoured her legacy by continuing to pursue a wilderness-based subsistence lifestyle with all its (single) parenting challenges. The film, from the Norwegian director Silje Jacobsen, is a contradictory beast that picks up the story soon after Maria's death and depicts a family ensconced in glorious scenery and yet cauterised by grief. It hangs over the smallest activity — one of the
Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Our family lived off-grid in the forest — then Mum died
Sometimes the smallest stories are the most powerful. In 2014 the Norwegian film-maker Silje Jacobsen started work on a film about Nik and Maria Payne, an unassuming British-Norwegian couple who went off grid with their family in the country's wild and woody north: living off the land, home schooling the younger children, escaping the money-go-round and the digital imprisonment that goes with it. It doesn't hurt that the Paynes are photogenic. An early scene shows the family tapping a tree for syrup as sunlight dapples through the forest canopy. There is no television in the house; instead the children are encouraged to raise animals, hug trees (literally) and commune with nature. The whole vision is idyllic. Then it all changes. In 2019 Maria died of
