Still: The Wolf, The Fox & The Leopard - David Verbeek

Yes, those are real-life North Alaskan wolves coming after their human prey in the bloodcurdling sequence early on in writer-director David Verbeek’s new feature, The Wolf, The Fox & The Leopard** (sold by Level K and premiering in International Narrative Competition at the Tribeca Film Festival).

“They were trained animals,” Verbeek says of the snarling predators (kept and raised by professional animal handlers in Hamburg).

The wolves hadn’t yet been fed that day been in advance of their scene with the young man. That meant they were genuinely hungry and the filmmakers pinned meat to the ground in front of the actor.

In the film, a young woman (played by brilliant young Irish actor Jessica Reynolds) is found living among the wolves. She is in a totally feral state when she is brought back to “civilisation.”

Verbeek’s initial idea when he embarked on the project was to make a film about climate change. 

“But I wanted to find a way that wasn’t necessarily political; that didn’t choose a side but somehow undercut the issue on a deeper, more philosophical level,” the filmmaker explains. “That brought me to want to make a film that was about our relationship with nature and what separates us from the natural world.”

The director wasn’t interested in making a polemical documentary but he did want the film to feel “raw and real.”

One trait Verbeek identified which only humans seem to possess is the ability to tell stories. They make sense of their environment by constructing narratives which always have them at the centre.

“The fundamental problem might be that we are separated from nature because we have drifted away from its true narrative,Our cannibalism of the planet is a result of our separating ourselves from it so much.”

In the film, which deliberately echoes old fairy tales, the wolf woman is kidnapped by environmental activists (Marie Jung and Nicholas Pinnock) who hide her away on an abandoned oil rig. They are idealists but they’re also zealots. 

The girl isn’t portrayed as a “Pocahontas character.” Instead, she is animalistic and sometimes even vicious. Early on, she is shown covered in mud, growling and running on all fours. By the final reel, she is working on a supermarket checkout till - so a strange metamorphosis. 

“Who are we as humans, as we are realising how unsustainable our way of living is on the planet, to tell someone who is not like us that they should be like us?” the director pinpoints one key question asked by his film.

Award-winning Japanese director Naomi Kawase plays the emollient-voiced narrator and author obsessed by the girl. Verbeek cast Kawase after meeting her at International Film Festival Rotterdam where she had been showing her official documentary about the Tokyo Olympics. 

“I knew I wanted this soft, fairytale-like Japanese way of expressing a story…I met her in a hotel lobby and I remember the first thing she said was that it [the project] sounds intriguing but that she didn’t want to be eaten.”

Verbeek couldn’t give her any such assurances but she still took the role.

In the film, the young wolf woman is (as Verbeek puts it) “raped by narration…all the time other people are telling her ‘this is who you are.’”

The Wolf, The Fox & The Leopard was made with multiple co-production partners. There were nine countries involved in all, and shooting took place everywhere from Croatia and Luxembourg to Taiwan.

Verbeek was working again with Lemming Film, his trusted Dutch partners.

“What is very important if you make films like this is that is also a personal relationship. Leontine [Petit, Lemming founder] and me are very good friends, best friends. I think that’s very important if you make films that are of such a personal nature - to get that kind of support.” 

Distributor Gusto is handling the Dutch release, likely to be early next year. In the meantime, Verbeek is looking forward to the premiere in New York.

“This is now my ninth film. What I’ve learned is that you need to go where the love is. Tribeca selected us very early on. Their whole team loved the film and the artistic director has already publicly said this is one of his favourite films this year,” the director explains why Tribeca is such a good fit for the movie. 

Find out more about Tribeca here.

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The Wolf, the Fox & the Leopard is written and directed by David Verbeek and produced by Lemming Film (NL) in co-production with Deal Productions (LU), Feline Films (IE), Flash Forward Entertainment (TW), Nukleus Films (HR) and Lemming Film Belgium. International sales are handled by LevelK. 

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*film supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Netherlands Production Incentive