The adventures of photographer Hugh Wilmar

In 1959, the film White Wilderness, part of Disney’s renowned True-Life Adventures wildlife film series, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. One of the film’s cameramen was the Dutch cinematographer Hugh Wilmar. He would never learn of the film’s success: two years earlier, he died in a train accident following a photo shoot in Machu Picchu, Peru.

Who was Hugh Wilmar, this wildlife and war photographer? Why is he so little known, despite leaving behind an extraordinary legacy of beautiful and spectacular photographs and groundbreaking nature films? How was he able to capture animals on film behaving in ways that appeared completely natural? Why were most of his wartime motion pictures never published? Why was Disney so interested in a young Dutch student of Wildlife Management at the University of Wisconsin? And was it true that during a wildlife safari in Kruger National Park he was attacked by a rhinoceros and forced to climb a tree to escape—or had his imagination simply run away with him?

The search for answers to these questions lead to an adventurous, revealing documentary about war and wildlife photographer Hugo Wilmar, who opposes censorship in the Dutch East Indies while collaborating on manipulated Disney productions.

Making use of an enormous collection of bequeathed photographs and letters, unraveling step by step the mysteries that surround him, the documentary reveals the short simultaneously adventurous and mysterious life story of the top photographer and filmmaker Hugo Wilmar (1923 - 1957), driven by love of nature. This simultaneously creates a demographically diverse photographic picture of the postwar decade that can be uniquely compared to the picture of our present time. The thread running through it all is the topical question of what is real and what is not, what is truthful and what is “fake”.

Cousin Hugo de Wolf reconstructs his uncle's life and discovers that image and reality often diverge: in doing so, he puts into perspective the position of Hugo Wilmar, who regularly balanced on the often thin line between news and fake news.

Wilmar's surviving life story begins in the middle of World War II. He is then 19 years old. The ‘Arbeitseinsatz’ hangs over his head. He regularly flees into nature to find beautiful and accurate pictures. And if those pictures do not present themselves quickly enough, Wilmar gets used to staging his ideal image. Thus he wins a photo contest with an unusual photograph of three birds photographed nearby, of which the jury does not realize they are stuffed birds.

As an Englander, Wilmar travels to England via a long and dangerous journey. Once he arrives, the nearsighted Wilmar fails all eye tests and is deemed unfit to fly. He then manages to secure a place at a prestigious war photographer training college in New York. This provides him with a new life mission. For the remaining years of his life, Wilmar will spend all over the world capturing reality as he sees it through his lens or - if he or one of his clients does not like the picture - how he would like to see it through his lens.

As a war photographer, he captures, among other things - sometimes with the help of staging - the bloody battle between independence fighters and Dutch soldiers in the former Dutch East Indies. However, the information service in the Netherlands only wants to publish his friendly good-news pictures. Frustrated, Wilmar resigns. He becomes a photojournalist for Publishing company De Spaarnestad. His fame then rises rapidly because of the beauty and technical perfection of his images with which he reaches an audience of millions.

The rise of television limits Wilmar's field of work. Moreover, he still prefers to capture his great passion, nature. He therefore decides to return to America. There he enrolls in a degree program in Wildlife Management at the University of Wisconsin.

In America, Wilmar meets his wife Mary. At the same time, Disney sees in him the ideal cameraman to realize “lifelike” nature films. Wilmar does not disappoint his new client. From remote locations ranging from the icy plains of the Canadian Arctic to the impenetrable Brazilian jungle, he captures wild animals such as the polar bear and the black panther seemingly in their natural habitat. His films touch and move millions of viewers in cinemas around the world. Only in retrospect do his letters reveal that, for example, the apparently happily tumbling polar bear cubs were pushed off a snow mountain with slight coercion and the black panther cub was painstakingly painted black.

Not long before Mary is due to give birth to their second child, Wilmar travels across Peru on a photo assignment. A train accident takes his life. He is only 34 at the time. His legacy of tens of thousands of photographs, hundreds of letters and articles, and Academy Award winning films bear lasting testimony to his relentless sometimes mysterious need to recreate the world in his image.