Cat&Docs has acquired international sales rights to “Derek vs. Derek,” a documentary about two feuding farmers at odds over how to manage their land, ahead of its world premiere in the international competition of the Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival.
Directed by James Dawson, who produced alongside Serena Kennedy and David Broder, the film follows an intensive dairy farmer named Derek who learns one day that his neighbor — also a Derek — has decided to forsake tradition and turn his land over to nature.
Their opposing philosophies on farming spark a long-running feud, with the film following the two Dereks’ turbulent, often funny relationship as tempers fray, wild animals escape and the land is transformed.
According to the director, “Derek vs. Derek” is a tribute to the post-war British Ealing comedies he loved as a child, “madcap stories with funny characters where the drama was often born out of eccentric obsessive passion,” Dawson said in a director’s statement.
Living in the idyllic countryside around Devon, England, Derek Banbury believes in intensive farming and is hellbent on producing industrially farmed food whatever the cost, while his neighbor, Derek Gow, is creating a haven for nature to flourish. As part of this “rewilding,” Derek is breeding a host of nearly extinct native wildlife to release once the land is “healed,” among them the wild boar running rampant on his fields and the beavers constructing dams across his farm’s waterways.
As these boar and beavers escape, digging up his neighbor’s fields and damming his streams, the two farmers begin to butt heads. Through their relationship, as the duo tussles over everything from hedge cutting to how to handle their resident storks, the film explores whether land is intended for food production, or whether saving the natural world should be prioritized at all costs.
It’s a debate that the director said he’s long wrestled with. “One story I’ve been wanting to tell for years is to do with the frightening loss of nature that’s occurred across the industrialized world over the last hundred years,” said Dawson.
“I spent much of my youth on farms, working on a mixed beef and arable farm in the Cotswolds in the school holidays, and a chicken farm near my home in the West Country at the weekends,” he continued. “The fields were humming with insects. When I’m in the countryside nowadays, I’m shocked by the absence of natural sounds: barely any insects, birds or wildlife.”
That absence is a frightening harbinger of things to come, he added. “Without a functioning ecosystem, the production of food is threatened. This is frightening. Scientists are telling us that biodiversity loss is now so severe we face an ‘insect apocalypse,’ irredeemable soil degradation and potential ecosystem collapse,” Dawson said.
The protagonists of “Derek vs. Derek” offered an entry point into telling the story of biodiversity loss — a story, the director admits, that can be quite “scary” to tell.
“Their relationship is not aggressive or angry but shaped by mutual misunderstanding. They peer over the high hedge that separates their farms with horror and bewilderment, each neighbor driven by their very different visions of how the land should be used,” Dawson said. “Intensive farming Derek thinks rewilding Derek is ‘destroying a perfectly good farm,’ while rewilding Derek thinks intensive farming Derek is ‘a psychopath when it comes to hedges.’”
He added: “I’ve come to believe strongly that if you can make an audience laugh or smile then they’re going to think about the story you’re telling.”
“Derek vs. Derek” is Dawson’s third documentary feature, following 2018’s “Organ Stops: Saving the King of Instruments,” and 2024’s “The Sewer Map of Britain.” An accomplished TV documentary director, his credits include episodes of the BAFTA-winning series “The Secret Millionaire” and “The Trust.”
Speaking of the acquisition, Catherine Le Clef, president and CEO of Cat&Docs, said: “This is a documentary that plays with all the tension and humor of great fiction, yet its stakes are profoundly real. Around the world, farmers are being forced to rethink how we produce food while the need to restore and protect nature has never been more urgent. By capturing that global crossroads through one intensely personal and entertaining rivalry, the film feels both timely and universally resonant.”
The Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival runs March 5 – 15.
Source: variety.com
