Peace Wilderness Man: On the Difficult Business of Living After Surviving

Tim Millard’s Peace Wilderness Man succinctly describes its subject(s) in its title. The 35-minute documentary represents the life of a veteran soldier in the Arctic as a way to move away from the memory of horror and towards discovering what peace the pitiless, icy landscape may offer. 

The human—and main—subject of the docu, a man named Lex Reilly recounts his journey from the days of an unsafe childhood, to PTSD of war, and finally to his life in the arctic circle as a guide. 

The first few minutes of the film showcases the best of its editing as man and nature coincide in harmonies of image and sound—exhales on the soundtrack match up with the images of snow driven by the wind or the water in a stream. In fact, the same holds true for the cinematography as well, with vibrant colours and striking compositions that do most of the heavy lifting for the film’s visual prowess.  

The emphatic element connecting the entire narrative is masculinity and Reilly’s relationship with it as he struggles to remain within its defining limits without having it cloud over his life. As the film progresses, Reilly shows an immense amount of introspection that can only be a product of time. Looking at him, you imagine the probable years of excruciating thinking it would have taken to reach the point of relative acceptance and composure with his vulnerabilities and his mistakes that he demonstrates in the film. And yet, it is visibly difficult, a halting account requiring a combination of near clinical, corporate, and generally impersonal language to create tolerable distance between himself and the weight of the years. 

At the point when the film’s timeline begins to approach the present day, the effortlessly beautiful imagery of the landscape combines with Reilly’s account to create a vaguely uncomfortable feeling that this might be a good fit for a business’s About Us page. 

The docu concludes with Reilly’s understanding of the life he has built up for himself and how it requires building others up on an everyday basis. Finding peace is, like surviving in the wild,  continuous, daily effort.

Watch Peace Wilderness Man Documentary Teaser