There's a moment in Derek vs Derek when Derek Banbury, the conventional dairy farmer, starts to visibly reckon with the collapse in pollinator populations. He doesn't convert on screen. He just goes quiet. That's the whole film in miniature: arguments made through evidence and character, not rhetoric. Director James Dawson structures the film as a neighbourly antagonism — rewilding advocate Derek Gow and farmer Derek Banbury share roughly 120 hectares each of Devon land near Dartmoor, and their philosophies about what land is for are in active, sometimes costly conflict. Gow's wild boar breach the fencing and eat sheep (or eat sheep that died naturally — the film is honest that this is unresolved). Banbury thinks the hedgerows should be trimmed. These aren't abstract policy disagreements; they're arguments about whose way of life gets to survive. Gow is the more charismatic subject — salty, Scottish, evangelical about beavers — but Dawson is careful not to make him the hero by default. Banbury's situation is rendered with genuine sympathy: a son ready to inherit, a wife running holiday cottages to keep the books balanced, milk prices suppressed by supermarket buyers. This is a man squeezed from both sides — by the economics of industrial food supply and by a neighbour releasing animals that don't respect property lines. The film earns the right to make its environmental argument precisely because it does this work first. The statistic that lands hardest is the one about pollinators: insect populations down by as much as 70% in some areas, attributable to insecticides and monocultural farmland. Dawson lets this sit alongside shots of Gow's land — water voles, beavers, storks — and the contrast does the persuasion without a narrator leaning on you. By the time a wolf reintroduction conference convenes on Gow's property (catered, in a lovely detail, by Linda Banbury), the film has done enough groundwork that even that proposition feels debatable rather than lunatic. The final act's move toward coexistence is perhaps slightly tidier than reality would warrant — documentary films about neighbours rarely end in actual symbiosis — but Dawson earns it because both men are shown changing incrementally rather than converting wholesale. This is the kind of nature documentary you could watch with someone who votes differently to you without it becoming a values confrontation. That's harder to pull off than it looks.
