Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths

Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths

Still from Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths (2025)
International Film Festival Rotterdam

VERDICT: Ostensibly about the preservation of an ancient language, Eva Giolo’s essay film combines linguistics with landscape and myth to captivating effect.

Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths is, first and foremost, an essay film about the Ladin language.

A Rhaeto-Romance language, it is indigenous to the area of Val Gardena in the Dolomites in Nothern Italy. Framed by the vistas of such glorious surroundings, Eva Giolo’s exploration of the language, and excavation of the cultures surrounding it, have an almost fable-like quality. Continually shifting between several different modes of filmmaking, she probes at ideas around magic and language, around doorways to hidden knowledge, and about the conservation of local traditions in the maintenance of identity. All the while, Val Gardena seems to resonate with ancient knowledge.

The film operates in several different streams which are combined to heady effect as they interconnect with one another and come to form the tapestry of the culture Giolo is depicting. These include landscape photography, sequences in which resident children search for cave openings, animated sequences of cave maps being drawn, children recounting local folklore, an expert linguist describing the facets and history of the Ladin language, alongside that are digital renderings of the sound of Ladin, as well as soundscapes creates by a choir’s breathing exercises.

The landscape is how Giolo seems to draw all these interwoven threads together. The lakes and caves of a locale dominate the myths that the children recite, the cave sketches become maps to the hidden knowledge of an Iron Age language that is still, despite the march of history, being preserved. Created in concert with a number of people from the region, and shot on lustrous 16mm, Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths manages to make the language feel not just alive but vital, and crafts a compelling study of a place that feels determined to retain its memory.

Director, cinematography, editing: Eva Giolo
Producers: Eva Giolo, Greta Langgartner, Stefno Riba
Sound design: Simonluca Laitempergher
Production companies: elephy (Belgium), Biennale Gherdeina, Ar/Ge Kunst (Italy)
Venue:
International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger Short Competition)
In Ladin
24 minutes