Movie Thoughts: A Wolf's Journey (2019)

 

• Released: March 9, 2019
  
• Directed by: Vincent Steiger
• Running time: 1 h 30 min
• Rating: 3.5/5

Synopsis

A documentary following Slava, a young wolf banished from his birth pack who travels thousands of kilometers east along the Mediterranean shoreline to find a new territory to form his own pack in.    

My Thoughts

Watched this one on Austrian TV, where they broadcast it split into two parts. I only saw one part on TV, but I luckily managed to find the second online. Yay for wolf documentaries!

Slava's journey is definitely an interesting one. It's well-shot and presented masterfully. You really do get a sense of how much distance this young male covered, and the many threats he faces. Bears, raging rivers, starvation, rival wolves, and of course humans.

It's far longer (3600km) than the journey of the famous North American wolf OR-7. Which does start to raise some questions. Honestly, despite how beautifully shot it was...the documentary feels very staged. Many of the shots are just too perfect. Documentaries usually have some sense of roughness to them, a feel that it was actually filmed (usually from a distance) in the wild. This is not the case in A Wolf's Journey. It's a beautiful film, and while I have no proof for this, I think it was at least partially staged.

And then the second elephant (or should I say wolf) in the room: is this even real? Like, let's hypothetically say that this is staged, did Slava the wolf actually exist and did he actually cover 3600km? I can't really find any information about it. It says it's "inspired by real facts", but how much of the movie is true then? There's quite a few wolves both in North America and Europe who got popular for having covered large distances, such as the previously mentioned OR-6 who traveled over 1600km. 

But like..I can't find any information on such a wolf in Europe. I know there was definitely one wolf in Europe who covered a huge distance as I read about them in multiple wolf non-fiction books, but that wolf was not called Slava (they were called Alan) and they traveled a different direction, about 1500km in northeastern direction rather than west along the coastline. I feel that Slava's story is probably inspired by journeys such as OR-7s and Alan's, but that it's not really directly true. I can't find any information about it outside of the documentary, at least. There is actually a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of this film, but I can't find it anywhere and it also appears to not have been released outside of France (so even if I could get my hands on it, I don't speak French), so for now my questions about this movie will remain unanswered.

Bottom line: it looks great, but for a documentary (which are usually expected to tell at least some semblance of the truth) it just feels a bit too grand. Too perfect. Too well-shot. There sure are wolves like Slava who traveled ridiculous distances, but it's not over 3600km and this documentary was probably at least partially staged. And it felt a bit inconsistent, since Slava's mate, who has a damaged right ear, has a perfectly fine ear in other shots. Either her ear became spontaneously un-floppy or they just used a different wolf actor in some shots. I'd probably be more fine with it if this was just a movie and not a documentary which claims to be based on true events.