The Chorus of the Land

Eva Giolo’s films are marked by a rhythmic quality attuned to the push and pull of the monumental and the ordinary, the mythical and the everyday. In Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths, premiering in the Tiger Shorts Competition at IFFR 2025, Giolo turns her camera to the Italian ski area Val Gardena, nestled in the valleys surrounding the Dolomites. Giolo evades a touristic image, instead capturing isolated moments in nature with her characteristic 16mm Bolex camera. Painterly still frames show the rocky surfaces of the mountains in autumn and spring, before the ski season, and the caves nuzzled into this landscape. Staged scenes show children looking into these dark crevices, searching for something that is missing, something ancient.

The gorgeous images are underscored with a soundtrack full of whispers and Ladin vocal warm-up exercises. The film is centered around Ladin, a Rhaeto-Romance language that is still spoken by a small but strong community in Val Gardena, the five valleys surrounding the Dolomites. It is now legally recognised and protected as a minority language, since its establishment as an official language since 1989. Its undulating crescendos seem to emanate from the crooks and crannies of the vast valleys. Throughout the film, we hear children recount local Ladin myths against cartographic animations which firmly situate the narratives within the landscapes, a community teacher contextualising the language’s origins, and a close-up of a mouth highlights Ladin’s unique pronunciations—both beautiful and abstract. These vignettes accumulate into a multivalent portrait of the Ladin language and its community.

Giolo has an enduring interest in capturing children’s voices in her films, examining their access to language and memory in both Memory is an Animal and A Tongue Called Mother (2019), and the way language is transmitted intergenerationally, from body to body. In her new film, children are sage in ways adults are not, capable of believing in the mythical histories of nature as Giolo explores their curiosity and faith in the natural world.

Landscapes often take on a character of their own throughout her work—in both Memory is an Animal and Becoming Landscape (2023), the local communities’ relationship to their home and identity is inherently connected to geography and geology. In Memory is an Animal, Val Gardena has been able to maintain its own language as a result of their location surrounded by the Dolomites. As someone recites in Becoming Landscape, “a landscape is a state of mind,” and “a state of mind is a landscape.”

How do you connect with the landscapes you capture in your films Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths, and Becoming Landscape?

Becoming Landscape was shot on Fogo Island, one of Newfoundland’s largest offshore islands. It was the culminating project of a three-month residency there, where I gave workshops at a local school. The film was a way to investigate a very specific place, with a small population of around 2,000 people, as well as extreme weather conditions that often prevent travel to the mainland.

I was curious about people’s attachment to the land. It’s historically a fishing island, although in recent years, there has been a lot of tourism. I held writing exercises with secondary students around the notion of home and belonging. We also read The Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by George Perrec. What struck me was how well all the children knew the island—they all orientated themselves by pointing out nature—when they gave directions, they would always say that their house was in the space beyond the big yellow rock, or beyond the large tree.

Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths was commissioned by Ar/Ge Kunst, Bolzano, to create a site-specific work in collaboration with the local community. While I was scouting for the film, I visited various locations around Bolzano, which led to a fascination for the local myths of that region, particularly in Val Gardena. It’s not that I deliberately chose to work on a project that is related to the landscape. In both places—Fogo and Val Gardena—the landscape is inherent to the identity of the place. The way people live there is a reaction to its specific geology and ever-evolving landscapes.

The camera is a tool for me to enter spaces that I would not be able to otherwise or to meet people that I would usually not meet. So, I guess it's like a tool to connect and to better understand the situation of the places in the world that I live in.

How did you develop Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths?

I decided that I’d like to make a film that focuses on language and the myths that were passed down via this primarily oral tradition.

I frequently work with children, and for Memory is an Animal, they become the storytellers, in a way. They also helped me find some of my locations, such as caves or holes. The myths were frequently set in the caves around the mountains, so the idea was to have the children read and interpret these stories. Childhood is one of the only times in your life where magical thinking still exists because the notion of logic and the real doesn’t really matter. For me, it was important to work with children around the primary-school age who could still believe in these stories.

In fact, many of the myths featured in the film had evolved massively over time, as they were never written down. While filming the children, I asked them to look for something within these caves and holes, something that is there but cannot be seen, a loose metaphor for the excavation of missing memories.

How did you encounter these myths?

I worked with Ulrike Kindl, a scholar who is an expert in the local Ladin mythologies, as well as German experts. We spoke a lot about magical thinking and its relationship to space and time.

Language in your film is represented as historical, embedded in local myths, and inherited generationally, but it is also completely guttural and bodily, as illustrated by the scenes where mouths express and enunciate.

At first, I was not so keen on explaining what the language ‘is’, but then I felt that it was necessary for the film to make more visible a language that is unknown by many people. Especially because of the rapid decrease in linguistic diversity today. When a language dies, a vision and a perception of the world might disappear too. Sofia Stuflesser, who was the ‘mouth’ that you see in certain isolated vignettes in the film, is a Ladin teacher who is very involved in community work, attempting to keep the language alive and how it is an active effort of survival, proudly and intentionally speaking it often in addition to Italian or German.

All your films are very rhythmic, with various vignettes that reappear throughout. How do you approach editing?

Filmmaking is a very intuitive process. The film doesn’t really exist until I edit it. Editing is a little bit like the way some people cook, experimenting. It’s building a timeline that’s both horizontal and vertical.

My background is in music, so I approach editing in a very musical manner, in the same way that one would write a score for a pop song: very dynamic, with the musicality that can be found in images as well as movement. My projects are not based on strong narratives but more on association and rhythm; I don’t work with a script. I often edit as I film, which works best for me. For Memory is an Animal, I edited the rushes in between filming. The decision to include certain segments happened naturally—I wanted to include the wooden toys you see, as they are traditional to the area.

In another sequence, the singing voices you hear are part of the Ladin women’s choirs. I asked them to portray the different elements, like wind and water, or even to do vocal exercises. Perhaps it’s due to my background in music, but I wanted to personify the landscape through the voices of women and children from the Ladin community.

Some of your previous films, such as Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose, are closer to home—filmed in Brussels. How do you work at home?

I was born and raised in Brussels; I know it very well, and the film is an ode to both this familiarity and to Chantal Akerman. I was very happy to spend more time at home and go back to all of those public spaces I used to go to as a teenager. It's a bit of a love letter to Brussels; it's a portrait of the city throughout the day. It also plays on surrealist elements with choreographed moments.

For the last few years, you have only been working with 16mm as your medium. Can you talk about your turn to film, and the process of working with such a time-sensitive medium?

I now work solely with a small Bolex, a mechanical camera that restricts the time one can film. I usually use 90% of what I film, and I will never film anything twice. I focus a lot on framing and choreographing what’s within the frame. I like working with restrictions; the limitations of the medium have helped me shape my language better and be very autonomous. What I really like with 16mm is the notion that I either really know the image I want to take, or an image of something that I’ve seen and I’m trying to reproduce, which is often the case. It requires a different kind of attention that draws on your memory and your presence.