Why you want to see Wolf the movie

Ask a director what the hardest thing is to work with and he will answer: ‘Children and animals.’ Director Cees van Kempen and producer Sander Emmering will give a different answer to your question: ‘Wolves.’

For five long years they filmed, or attempted to film the wolf in the Netherlands. Weeks camping in a camouflage tent, a camera covered with leaves, watching the wind and the ravens. Because where there is a raven, there is a wolf, as I now know.

After weeks of not getting a shot, director Cees van Kempen received a call from his regular cameraman. ‘I've got it! The shot you've been waiting for.’ For years, they had been filming the little wolf pups licking the railway tracks. Because the taste of iron resembles blood, the tracks served as a lollipop for wolf pups. But just footage of licking wolf pups doesn't make a story. The film Wolf is precisely so distinctive because it not only records like many nature documentaries but also directs. That's why they even brought in creative advisor Maarten Treurniet, who knows nothing about wolves (now he does, I suspect), but everything about storytelling. A clever mind who can place a photo frame on the mantelpiece of his fireplace, because it is packed with awards for the films he directed (De Passievrucht, De Heineken Ontvoering).

He ensures that the film can serve up little stories, so a scene was needed. But letting a wolf find something is already a task that can take a month, getting it to do something that gives you a story is about as impossible as catching your flight at Schiphol and seeing your suitcase roll off the baggage carousel on time. So that call from the cameraman was the starting signal to pop open that chilled bottle of Krug. He had filmed a train passing over the tracks and the wolf pups fleeing one by one from this strange danger.

And this is indicative of the attention to detail around Wolf. Every shot (I saw the eyelashes of the wolves and now know that the top half is blonde and the bottom half is dark) is filmed with so much love and so sharply, the music (specially composed) and the editing rolled out like a dance over the images, all covered with a blanket of beautiful words spoken by Matthijs van Nieuwkerk.

Not letting me fall asleep during a cinema film is quite an achievement. To succeed in doing that during a nature film on a Monday evening after a busy weekend: exceptional. Making me laugh, cry, and wonder: unique. Director Cees van Kempen is hereby my new Hans Klok; with everything he shows in Wolf, I think: but how?

Wolf premieres on Thursday in more than 120 cinemas across the country.