Our project is a blend of science and adventure narrated by the director but told in large part by the characters. Our story will take us into the wilderness of the Westfjords to find wild foxes, follow Madi as she goes into rural Iceland to understand the potential gravitas of her research results, and show Ester’s quest to generate public concern.
FOX GRIM is a documentary that follows one researcher, Dr. Ester Rut Unnsteinsdóttir, who has dedicated her life to a species her country has tried to exterminate, and the young biologist, Madison Bradley, who has travelled across the Atlantic to help her answer one crucial question: is pollution hurting the species?
There, Ester shows what more we can learn about the fox’s life from her body, and tells us about the dangerously high mercury level she has recorded in their tissue. Madison Bradley will help study how damaging the mercury is to the fox, and whether this danger extends to the hunters who share some of the same foods.
Our story begins by paralleling the life of a wild Arctic fox and a hunt- er—how they eat some of the same foods, and endure the same land- scape—until their two paths cross and the fox is shot. We learn how the hunter donates this fox’s body to research, and follow the carcass back to Ester’s lab.
This video is what the director, Megan Perra, made last winter with low quality equipments in a single day of shooting. Now with a full production team and over a year of planning, we will return to this story with new characters, higher stakes, and cinema quality equipment.