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.
The essence of memory lies in sounds and smells, sensations, touches, perceptions; perhaps what truly strikes us isn’t the monumentality of the history contained within buildings, but the energy of the people that remains trapped there, like a princess who will never be saved. Eva Giolo’s film is such a capsule, a playful reenactment that sends children to look for history inside caves and among the plants. A collection of adventures just unearthed from the ground, traversed thru forests with whispers coming from the depths and tugging at your sleeve. And then there’s the Ladin language, with its playful inflections, a language almost lost, spoken only by this small community. How does a language disappear, how does history actually disappear? And how do we find her again? (Georgiana Mușat)
Eva Giolo is an audio-visual artist working in film, video, and installation, born in Brussels. Her work places particular focus on the female experience, employing experimental and documentary strategies to explore themes of intimacy, permanence and memory, along with the analysis of language and semiotics. Giolo uses her camera to capture the “mundane” moments of the everyday to reveal their hidden depth.
