The Path of Puma-36 - Live on Wild Commons
A young mountain lion left his mother and walked 1,500 miles through Northern California. Researchers watched the whole thing.
At around eighteen months old, young mountain lions leave their mothers and set out alone. For P-36, a juvenile male born in California's North Bay, that journey took him across busy highways, through redwood forests, farmland, and residential neighbourhoods, and into territory shaped at every turn by human development. Trail cameras maintained by the Living with Lions project had already been documenting him as a cub. When he began his dispersal, researchers followed along.
The Path of Puma 36, directed by Amelie Bluestone as her senior thesis film at the Savannah College of Art and Design, uses P-36's journey to explore something larger than one animal's travels. Mountain lions are solitary and elusive, generally inclined to avoid people wherever possible. But as habitat fragments and development expands, young lions searching for territories of their own are increasingly moving through places we think of as entirely ours. The film reframes those encounters not as wildlife intruding where it doesn't belong, but as animals navigating the only landscape available to them. P-36 may be the subject, but the landscape is the real story: what it asks of the animals moving through it, and what it might ask of us in return.
The film was an official selection at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival and received the Special Jury Award for Best Wildlife Film at the Green Film Festival of San Francisco.
Why This Film Matters
Protecting mountain lions is not only a question of preserving distant wilderness. It also depends on understanding how animals move through the developed spaces between protected areas, and whether we are willing to make room for those movements. The Path of Puma 36 makes that abstract conservation challenge personal, following one young lion through a landscape where the boundary between human and wild space has become nearly impossible to draw.
Film Credits
Director / Producer / Editor: Amelie Bluestone
Producer: Ashton Whitman
Co-Producer: Leo Frank
Director of Photography: Megan Mullen
2nd Unit DP: Kaeley Beam
Location Sound: Haley Foster
Sound Supervisor: Matt Michelangelo
Contributing Composer: Jacob Kitchen
Colorist: Nissy Davis
Trailer Editor: Joshua Zapf
Runtime: 15 minutes
Release Year: 2026
What is Wild Commons?
Wild Commons was co-founded by the Wild Lens Collective and Impact Media Lab to provide a new way to distribute independent wildlife and environmental films. So many films have successful festival runs and then never get seen again due to the very broken distribution system - we’re here to change that!
The Wild Commons YouTube channel hosts amazing, free to watch independent films and supports the creators by using YouTube’s monetization tools. By watching the films and subscribing to our channel, you can support the filmmakers as well as helping them create even more films.