the stars of the amazon studios documentary film Wildcat they are a man, a woman and an orphaned baby jungle cat who they live with in a rainforest in Peru. The subject of this first feature from a Virginia-based filmmaking couple is something else: how to survive psychological damage and suicidal depression to find peace and a place in the world.
Half of the duo that made Wildcat, melissa lesh, he wondered about the reception of a movie that sounds easy to root for at first glance, because who doesn’t love people babysitting kittens? – and then delves into tough topics including mental illness, despair, and self-harm.
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“It’s scary to put something like this out into the world and not know how it’s going to land,” Lesh said on Deadline’s. Documentary Contenders event, together with your partner and colleagues Wildcat director-producer, trevor beck frost.
Wildcat follows a scarred British war veteran, Harry Turner, and an American wildlife biologist, Samantha Zwicker, who live in a remote Amazon jungle in Peru and raise abandoned ocelots, leopard-like, spotted jungle cats that they hope to release back into the wild. Part love story, part nature essay, Wildcat it’s also a portrait of the battered psyche of an ex-soldier, rendered with an intimacy born of the film’s isolated setting.
The first results are encouraging. Wildcat premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September with an original song written by Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes. She won Audience Favorite Awards at festivals in New Jersey and Indiana and earned thunderous applause in November at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival.
Frost was a photojournalist when he met Turner four years ago in Peru and realized there was a story in this young British man, covered in tattoos, living almost off the grid after tours in Afghanistan and a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder. Turner “was still trying to figure out how he was going to move on with his life,” Frost said.
Still, “I don’t think any of us expected it to be the trip that it ended up being,” he said of himself and Lesh.
The film traces the stress of the relationship between Turner and Zwicker and, in the film’s central plot, Turner’s frustrations in caring for a baby ocelot, named Keanu, and preparing it for reintroduction into the wild.
The filmmakers never appear in front of the camera, but they lived and worked in enclosed spaces with their subjects, often for weeks at a time.
“We all become this family together,” Lesh said. “They shared as much of themselves with us as we did with them. It’s a huge responsibility, and the last thing we want this movie to do is cause harm.”
He added: “And so far, seeing it out in the world and seeing the breadth of people reaching out to us, and how it’s resonating with different people, feels really amazing. It feels like maybe we threaded those needles just right.”
Wildcat opens with a limited theatrical release on December 21 and moves to Prime Video on December 30.
Check back on Wednesday for video of the panel.
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