FilmSkool — a free film school
Bookworm
Eleven-year-old Mildred’s life is turned upside down when her mother lands in hospital and estranged, American magician father, Strawn Wise, comes to look after her. Hoping to entertain the bookish tween, Strawn takes Mildred camping in the notoriously rugged New Zealand wilderness, and the pair embark on the ultimate test of family bonding – a quest to find the mythological beast known as the Canterbury Panther.
2024 · Directed by Ant Timpson · 104 min · Adventure · Family · Comedy · Drama · Screenplay in the scene database · 17 frames
Tagline
Adventure called her name... Unfortunately dad answered.
Plot
Mildred is a bookish 11-year-old girl who lives with her mother in New Zealand and is interested in the Canterbury panther. One night, an exploding toaster puts her mother into a coma. Mildred's magician father Strawn arrives from the United States, but Mildred is upset with him for his absence from her life and is unimpressed by his magic tricks. Strawn agrees to take Mildred on a camping trip in the Canterbury Region, during which Mildred hopes to capture footage of the panther. The reward for such footage is NZ$50,000, enough to pay off Mildred's mother's debts.
Mildred and Strawn find the panther drinking from a stream, and Mildred films it on her video camera. Strawn and Mildred then meet a pair of hikers who give their names as Arnold and Angelina and begin travelling with them. Arnold robs Strawn, taking Strawn's phone and wallet and Mildred's camera, before Arnold and Angelina depart. The next day, Strawn and Mildred come across Arnold and Angelina arguing in their tent. Mildred steals Arnold's bag, and she and Strawn run away. Mildred finds her camera in Arnold's bag but discovers that Arnold and Angelina have filmed over her panther footage.
The panther approaches Strawn and Mildred at the edge of a chasm, and the duo begin crossing the chasm on a rope to escape. The panther claws through the rope, and Strawn and Mildred fall into the chasm. When Strawn regains consciousness, he finds that Mildred's legs are trapped under a log. He gives her a hallucinogenic mushroom to ease the pain and, just moments after she calls him Dad for the first time, lifts the log off of her legs.
Plot summary from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.
Crew
- Screenplay: Toby Harvard
- Cinematography: Daniel Katz
- Edited by: Dan Kircher
- Music: Karl Sölve Steven
- Production design: John Allan
- Produced by: Victoria Dabbs, Mette-Marie Kongsved, Roxi Bull, Laura Tunstall
Cast
- Nell Fisher as Mildred
- Elijah Wood as Strawn Wise
- Michael Smiley as Arnold
- Vanessa Stacey as Angelina
- Morgana O'Reilly as Zo
- Millen Baird as Doctor
- Nikki Si'ulepa as Dotty
- Theo Shakes as Reginald
Production
- Country: New Zealand, United States of America
- Language: English
- Studios: Firefly Films, Nowhere
- Themes: wilderness
On this film
This is the plain index, shown because JavaScript is off. Every lesson here is a free video published by the channel credited on it and plays through that channel's own embed — FilmSkool hosts nothing.