The remarkable journey of Bristol Foster, Robert Bateman, and the Grizzly Torque is fondly detailed in The Art of Adventure
THE ART OF ADVENTURE (Alison Reid, 2025)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Sunday, October 11, 4:45
theartofadventuremovie.com
newplazacinema.org
“Life is an adventure. It’s mystical. It’s magical. I’d like to be twenty-five years old again, but I’m glad I had all those life experiences,” biologist and naturalist Bristol Foster says at the beginning of Alison Reid’s utterly fabulous documentary, The Art of Adventure. “In those days, it was just raw nature, raw and beautiful. I think of how much things have changed and how damn lucky we were to do it then.”
Artist and naturalist Robert Bateman adds, “I think I’m basically the same kid that I always was. I always wanted to do adventures and speak up, spread the word about nature. . . . It was like a dream trip in a way.”
In 1957, Foster and Bateman, both Canadians in their twenties, began an eighteen-month journey covering more than fifty thousand miles, visiting nineteen countries across four continents in a brownish-yellow 1957 Series I Land Rover that they dubbed the Grizzly Torque. They drove it through mud and desert, had it transported (not so safely) by sea and air, and lived in it, sometimes surrounded by curious indigenous people and animals. They were originally in search of birds, but their discoveries quickly became far more anthropological and wide-ranging.
Fortunately for the world, they extensively detailed the trip, with copious photographs, movies, and a detailed journal, and Bateman added a small painting of each nation they visited to a mural around the Grizzly Torque. What they found on their route is remarkable; what is even more remarkable is that they survived, and now, in their nineties, best friends for eight decades, they’re sharing their story.
Reid’s previous feature documentary, The Woman Who Loves Giraffes, is about Canadian zoologist Anne Innis Dagg, who worked with Foster and is credited as a producer on The Art of Adventure; she died in 2024 at the age of ninety-one. In this follow-up, Reid and editor Dave Kazala interweave stunning footage of Bateman and Foster’s travels with new interviews of Bateman and Foster, members of their families, and such others as geographer and naturalist Briony Penn, writer and art curator Paul Gilbert, artist and naturalist Erik Thorn, anthropologist and writer Wade Davis, Haida leader and political activist Gidansda Guujaaw, environmental activists David Suzuki and Tara Cullis, and Land Rover collector Alan Simpson. Gilbert, the author of The Rover Boys, gets significant screen time; he was also one of Bateman’s high school art students and helped form the Bateman Foundation. Together they paint a loving picture of these two extraordinary men who have dedicated their lives to protecting and saving the environment, well before it was a cause célèbre or hot-button political issue.
“This is not a trip that you could do today. They saw the world at a time when it was transitioning from almost the Middle Ages to the modern world, and they saw it as it was,” Gilbert says. Bateman surmises, “In a tiny way, I guess people might view Bristol and I as adventurers in another era.”
Robert Bateman and Bristol Foster recount their old and new adventures in award-winning documentary
It’s also a poignant look at aging, as the film shifts between shots of the two rugged, handsome, well-built young men and their current selves, walking slowly, facing medical problems, but never giving up on their goals, both still doing whatever they can to help get us out of the mess we’ve created. Cinematographer Dale Hildebrand captures the two elderly men in gorgeous vistas of beautiful landscapes whose very existence is in jeopardy, but even then, hope conquers fear.
The last part of the film focuses on what became of the Grizzly Torque, which comes to represent everything to the men. “This Land Rover symbolizes nature, like a magic carpet to get into magical places,” Bateman says.
And, in its way, The Art of Adventure is like a cinematic carpet, taking us into magical places.
The Art of Adventure is screening October 11 at 4:45 at New Plaza Cinema, followed by a Q&A with Reid and Wild Tomorrow cofounder and COO and Columbia adjunct professor Wendy Hapgood.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]