Baba Dana Talks to the Wolves

This film is a painting, a folio of photographs, an art installation, a performance piece, a poem, a dance. Baba Dana, the dancer; filmmaker Ralitsa Doncheva, the choreographer. An encounter, a meeting place, a walk in the woods, a conversation without words. A journey, a dreamscape, an illumined fairy tale, a study on light and darkness. A biopic, an untold history—a herstory, if you will—a meditation, a work of sound art. The life and lifestyle depicted as much as the materials through which they are depicted—that is, Baba Dana herself and the hand-processed expired film stock alike—seem, at once, extinct and yet so alive before our eyes: a lost world but indisputably one pulsating with breath like a forest, like the sky, like a single, precious life. At times it felt like frames were being lifted from the library of my own Balkan imagination, a secret storied children’s book featuring wild women, witches, and wolves, lost mountain monasteries where birds instead of monks sing and the constant chiming bells of a perhaps flock of sheep ringing truer than the alpine gods and goddesses themselves. This film is many things: a delight, a treasure, a rare gem.

Aurora Prelević
Writer, performance maker, cinephile