Some people fantasize about a glamorous life in a penthouse apartment; others imagine a sprawling beach house. I have always had a dream of moving my family from our house in the country to a treehouse in the deep deep woods, far from pavement and internet, where we live off our wits and…well, the details are fuzzy.
I am absolutely one hundred percent alone among my family members in having this fantasy, so I am forced to live it out through books and movies. A few years ago, I was beside myself to hear about Captain Fantastic, which (other than the mother being dead) was pretty much exactly what I wanted: A close family, intimacy with nature and surviving on what they could harvest, grow, trap, kill. Plus, they were schooled in classic education. Plus…well…Viggo Mortensen. Once they were forced to go to the city, they pretty much lost me, but I dined out for months on the first half of the movie.
Then last weekend, we stumbled across a new documentary, Acasa, My Home, which is basically a real-life Captain Fantastic set in Romania. Though without classic education or Viggo Mortensen. A large family lives in a nature park adjacent to Bucharest, fishing and raising chickens and pigs and harvesting what they can. They were happy, but it was also not easy. They too were forced into the city, and it did not go smoothly, at least for the parents. Even the kids wanted to go back to their old home, but were not allowed for many reasons, primarily lack of education and the hygienic shortfalls of their wild life (in which they literally shared their beds with birds and pigs). Even though I rooted against the authorities, I did so knowing they were pretty much right in forcing them out of the park.
Since there was never a chance of relocating to a remote mountain top or Scottish Highland, it’s not as if my bubble was completely burst. And yet it dampen my fantasy life a bit. Documentaries can be dangerous in that way. Sometimes you just want to believe the Hollywood version.
Kate Staples 