Christian Cargill's Patrick Wolf Documentary, Narrated by Tilda Swinton, Premieres at Barbican

Christian Cargill's feature documentary Wolf traces Patrick Wolf's rise, withdrawal and creative rebirth, with an off-camera conversation between Wolf and Tilda Swinton forming its narrative spine. The film premieres at the Barbican on 22 October and screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Swinton and Wolf first met when she voiced hope on his 2009 album The Bachelor; Cargill reunited them, and what was planned as a 45-minute talk ran six hours. Present-day scenes shot at Wolf's Ramsgate home are intercut with archive material, illustration, cinema clips and natural-world imagery. Cargill drew on more than 50 hours of footage handed to him in a shoebox, including home videos by Wolf's father and recordings by Susanne Oberbeck of No Bra, assembled with experience from the 2022 documentary Meet Me In The Bathroom. Owen Pallett, Oscar-nominated, composed the score, selecting songs from Wolf's catalogue; a passage on addiction is set to a reimagining of Demolition from the 2003 debut Lycanthropy. The film addresses Section 28-era hostility, school bullying and expulsion, and press treatment of his flamboyance, alongside the 2012–2023 retreat marked by addiction, financial ruin and grief. Wolf, 43, says the first edit was painful but that Cargill helped him close a book. Cargill, speaking from Canada, calls it a film about struggle, hope and resilience, following his BAFTA Cymru-winning Heart Valley and Recomposing Earth.