Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths

In the valleys surrounding the Dolomite Mountains, children reimagine ancient Ladin legends while they examine bodies of water, holes, caves and passages looking for something lost or forgotten. Through a poetic choreography, the film becomes a fictional journey creating resonances between the landscape, magical thinking and Ladin – the protected old Rhaeto-Romanic language of the valleys, a puzzle unfolds as a timeless fable.

In Eva Giolo’s latest work the resonances of place, magic and myth unfold through play. Attendant to the landscape through a child’s-eye, the film streams into the specific, hidden, and vast geologies of the Dolomite mountains, through the trills and murmurs of Ladin, the minority Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in the region. As the children narrate local folklore, this language and its oral traditions, passed from body to body, itself becomes corporeal and indivisible from the land. (Open City Documentary Film Festival)