Except the wolves didn't kill him. He was murdered.
The only person who believes that is the sheriff nobody trusts. She's about to open a Pandora's box of secrets that could tear her community apart.
Explore the FilmSet in the stark, beautiful, and economically struggling fictional town of
Fort Clarke, Idaho, the story begins with the discovery of the body of environmental activist
Vincent Boucher, apparently mauled to death by wolves. But when sheriff Daphne Two-Rivers
discovers a bullet hole under the carnage, it launches a firestorm battle between local
ranchers, a powerful resort developer, and Daphne’s own people.
The investigation
forces
Daphne into a reluctant partnership with Jackson Stone, a passionate wolf biologist who
believes the wolves are being systematically eradicated from the region… but for what
purpose? Their investigation will uncover something far darker than Daphne could have imagined,
that will shake the town to its roots, and force her to make a choice between the law and true
justice.
Select a location to open the field guide.
The world this film lives in is real. The wolves, the missing women, the failing systems — none of it is invented. Here is what we stand for, and who is already doing the work.
Where wolf packs thrive, rivers run cleaner, forests grow denser, elk herds are naturally prevented from overgrazing. Remove them and the landscape slowly unravels in a process ecologists call a trophic cascade, but ranchers call progress.
For decades, the grey wolf has been politically scapegoated, its legal protections dismantled in legislative sessions far from the land it calls home. In Idaho alone, the wolf population has been reduced by state-sanctioned culling programs that have no scientific basis in ecological management. The argument is always the same: wolves cost us. The truth is the opposite.
Organizations doing the work
Non-lethal deterrence and coexistence programs for ranchers and wolves alike.
Mexican gray wolf recovery and Endangered Species Act protection.
Federal advocacy for wolf protections and Rights of Nature frameworks.
“The wolf is not the predator in this story.”
active MMIWR cases addressed during the National Week of Action
Every year on May 5th, the United States observes the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives. The date honors Hanna Harris — a 21-year-old Northern Cheyenne woman murdered in 2013, whose family was forced to conduct their own search when law enforcement failed to respond. Their relentless grief became a movement.
The crisis they named is not new. Indigenous women in North America face disproportionately high rates of violence. The systems meant to protect them routinely fail. Jurisdictional gaps between tribal, state, and federal law enforcement create spaces where cases go cold, families go without answers, and perpetrators walk free.
This is the world our protagonist Daphne Two-Rivers works in. A sheriff who carries a badge that means something different depending on which side of an invisible line she’s standing on.
“Justice is something older and harder to name than the law.”
Documentaries reach people who are already looking. Narrative cinema reaches everyone else.
A Theory of Wolves is built on a simple premise: that a thriller — a genuinely gripping, morally complex, beautifully made thriller — can carry the weight of real injustice without becoming a lecture. That an audience leaning forward in their seat, desperate to know what Daphne finds in that lockbox under the floorboards of a local dive bar, is also an audience that will leave the theatre asking questions about the real world that produced this story.
Wind River brought MMIWR into living rooms that had never heard the term. Erin Brockovich moved public opinion on environmental contamination more than a decade of advocacy reporting.
This film is built in that tradition, with one distinction. It centers an Indigenous woman as the figure of authority and moral clarity. Not a victim. Not a symbol. A sheriff who uses her authority and moral quest for justice to guide her actions.
“An audience that stays for the story will leave with the truth.”
The organizations doing this work need your action. Below are a handful of the groups whose work runs parallel to this film’s. These are the people building the pipelines, doing the research, and showing up for families and animals that the system has forgotten or targeted.
Watch this space. We’ll have specific ways to plug in, through screenings, giving pathways, and direct connections to the organizations fighting for both the land and the people who call it home.
Until then: learn their names. Follow their work. Tell someone else.
A Theory of Wolves will be built with Indigenous leadership from the ground up and in partnership with the communities whose stories it carries.
Whether you're a filmmaker, an advocate, a journalist, or simply someone the story calls to, we'd love to hear from you.