Le Loup et le Lion
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After her grandfather dies, Alma, a young piano student in New York, returns to her childhood home on a remote Canadian island. One night, after a storm, she finds a lion cub destined for a circus in Vancouver. Fearing that it might be mistreated, she decides not to return it. Shortly afterward, a female Arctic wolf, on the run from two scientific researchers, brings her cub to the girl's house. When the wolf mysteriously disappears, Alma doesn't feel like leaving her cubs behind. The two grow up together as siblings and, for a few years, live a quiet and peaceful existence with her, until an accident reveals their secret and the authorities decide to separate them. From that moment on, all three have only one desire: to start their family again, despite the thousands of kilometers that separate them. After the success of Mia and the White Lion, Gilles de Maistre returns to explore the animal kingdom, telling the story of the emotional and seemingly impossible friendship between two large predators.
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About the Movie The Wolf and the Lion
After the international success of Mia and the White Lion, directed by Kevin Richardson (the “lion whisperer”), director Gilles de Maistre wanted to reunite his team for a new project. «While I was working on the film Mia, I was contacted by Andrew Simpson who wanted to visit the set», says de Maistre. Simpson is an animal trainer internationally renowned for his ability to work with wolves, who has achieved great recognition with the HBO series Game of Thrones and the film The Revenant by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. He was very interested in the work of Richardson and de Maistre, and during an evening spent comparing their experiences, it emerged that, as far as they knew, a film had never been made in which a lion and a wolf appeared together! We chose to make this new adventure on Sacacomie Island, two hours northeast of Quebec, an idyllic nature reserve isolated enough to ensure the animals’ safety and well-being. We filmed by following the wolf and lion as they grow together, from their earliest moments to their youth, over a period of 15 months. «This film had a greater difficulty than Mia», says de Maistre, «To work with two animals from different species, you need time to understand. The art of this film is to see these two mythical predators together on screen, showing us how they manage to become brothers, despite being enemies in nature. The most important thing for us was that this bond was real, we didn’t want to use special effects. The relationship between the animals had to be real».
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