The wolf, mythologised as a symbol of predatory evil and a threat to humans by fairytales and horror movies, has returned to Germany more than a century after it was wiped out through hunting.
In Wolf Country, which has its international premiere at the International Film Festival Amsterdam in the Frontlight section, is an attempt by documentarian Ralf Bücheler to separate and elucidate the unembellished facts about this social animal and its behaviour from the fantasy and fear-mongering tabloid newspaper reports that bolster calls to eradicate it. This investigation into the lupine lifestyle and its impact does not shy away from the damage wolves can cause or their earthier aspects, as researchers collect bloody carcasses and bodily waste to learn more. The wiry, brownish, furtive-looking animals appear less majestic and more vulnerable to harm by humans — that other predator — than the popular imagination would have us believe.
Relying heavily for its information on those devoted to scientific monitoring and wolf population management, liaising with farmers and educating the public, the film takes us inside the spirited public debate in Germany over how best to handle the wolf resurgence. It is a nation in which there is little wilderness left for them, and they must survive in close quarters with humans, sharing their roads, fields and villages. The talky and explanatory, procedure-based orientation of the doc is not the most seductive approach and can feel uninspired, particularly in its extensive segments pulled from lectures and talk shows (the subject is handled with less finesse than in Sebastian Mulder’s hit 2021 short doc made using surveillance footage Naya, on a wolf that returned to Belgium and was made into a tabloid celebrity). But Bücheler succeeds in stripping the glamour from our preconceived perceptions of wolves, to leave us more informed on the realities of a fascinating shift in the dynamics of nature and civilisation, and our inter-species hierarchies of power and control.
We follow the activities of the Lupus Institute for Wolf Monitoring and Research in the German state of Saxony as its employees screen the remains of dead wolves for insight into their health and habits, assess local sightings and amateur footage, and trace activities captured by night-vision camera. The black-and-white imagery of wolves roaming the forest in the dark and crossing paths with other creatures, including stags, their piercing eyes bright dots of light, is the film’s most engrossing. We become privy to what seems a secret world of bustling activity and fraught drama that goes on as humans sleep, and sometimes results in death or dire injury. Another segment shows a veritable crime scene, after ten sheep are killed in a spree, but just one foreleg is eaten. Their bodies are numbered, and the farmer interviewed, as moves are made to analytically determine if a wolf was responsible. It is a gruesome event, to be sure, but instinct in nature is not mystified; rather, potential solutions are examined, including the hulking stock guard dogs that are a new but not yet widespread concept in Germany.
Tyrolean alpine farmers protesting with cowbells to allow the legal hunting of wolves again, conservationists eager to balance the protection of all creatures, and scientists all offer their expertise and perspectives. What we are left with by the end, ironically, and perhaps without the full intention of the filmmaker, is a portrait not just of the returning wolves, but of administrative human beings as a species. Convinced of their superior intelligence and their right and duty to order and rule over the natural world according to their precepts, it is they who decide whether and on what terms wolves may come or go, by a democratic process of knowledge, debate and elections that sits oddly beside the wolves’ oblivious nocturnal patrols.
Director: Ralf Bücheler
Producer: Ingo Fleiss
Cinematography: Daniel Schönauer, Sebastian Koerner
Editing: Anja Pohl
Sound Design: Paul Meier
Music: Cico Beck
Production company: If… Productions Film GmbH
Venue: IDFA
In German
102 minutes
