How ‘Wild Life’ Protagonist Kris Tompkins Overcame Grief To Accomplish Something Incredible For The Planet
22.04.2023 - 20:11
/ deadline.com
The filmmaking couple Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have earned a reputation for making documentaries about people who accomplish the unthinkable – the no-ropes climber Alex Honnold in the Oscar-winning Free Solo, or the divers of The Rescue who, against all odds, saved a group of Thai kids stranded in a flooded cave.
As it happens, the heroes of their best-known films have been men, but in their latest documentary, Wild Life, the focus shifts in large part to a woman, the conservationist and former Patagonia CEO Kris Tompkins.
“It was really nice to make a film where there’s a woman at the center,” Vasarhelyi remarked at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, where the film screened last month. Wild Life, from National Geographic and Picturehouse, just expanded to theaters in Southern California, including Los Angeles, as well as the San Francisco Bay area after opening in New York and DC last weekend.
The documentary tells the love story of Kris and her late husband Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face and co-founder of retailer Esprit. They met in mid-life at a time when Doug had given up his companies for a life in the wild terrain of remote Chile and Kris also found herself yearning for a radical change of existence. Together, they began acquiring land in Chile and Argentina on a massive scale – not for their private enjoyment, but with the goal of turning it over to those countries for the creation of vast national parks.
In the film, Kris reads from her journals about being with Doug in Chile. “I feel the memories of nearly 20 years in this valley. Years of joy, pain, doubts, and reassurance… Few have lived as we have here.”
In conversation with Deadline, Kris Tompkins conceded it took some convincing to get her