Immediately after having completed My Neighbour is a Bear in January 2022 and graduated with Merit at The Master of Arts in Wildlife Filmmaking at the University of West England in Bristol, I started thinking about a new idea.
Bears and wolves are the reason I delved into wildlife photography and having already made a film about the rarest bear on earth directed me to the trail of wolves without thinking twice.
I grew up reading books and dreaming about them and I thought that my time with the bears was over and a new boost of adrenaline was needed for me. It was time for wolves, my time with wolves.
I gave myself some time to develop ideas and find the right characters, the right story. Then I found Gianluca.
In February 2022 I made a recce in Italy and spent time with this young man in the heart of the Italian Apennines looking for wolves and just after a few hours with him on the hunt I understood that there was potential for telling an incredible conservation story filled with action and a lots of wolf sequences.
In Summer 2022 I wrote the film, structured in different chapters to be filmed in different parts of Italy with different wolf families in different times of the year. Gianluca's journey starts in Rome and follows the comeback the wolves made since their protection by law in the 70's: from the Apennines to the Alps passing through rivers, fields, hills and beaches. I have started shooting the first chapter of the film: Winter in February-March 2023 and then I started a crowdfunding campaign for raising funds for the film.
Filming in different locations in Italy over the last 24 months has been challenging. I had to adapt with the rhythms of Gianluca and spent the nights in the same places he would in order to find wolves all over the country, and consequently we slept in the car, abandoned rudere, mountains, forests, caves and that helped the production costs (not my back and my knees) but I have 12 more months of production where I am working towards filming in more different regions of Italy, hire a composer for writing the 52 minutes film score, an editor, an animator, a sound designer and licence some archive footage. Making a film is very expensive, especially a long term project of 3 years!
Here is when your contribution becomes very important in order to try to complete this project.
You can find more info on the crowdfunding link: