Kateřina Traburová

1,200 kilometres of snowy landscape to be covered in 12 days. These are the conditions for the Finnmarksløpet sled dog race and Czech husky breeder Jana Henychová is set to participate again.

When director and ethnologist Hana Nováková encountered an elk, it changed her life. And she wasn't the first. For centuries, people across continents and cultures have been fascinated by this ancient totem animal, one of the largest mammals in the northern hemisphere. Whereas in the past they wanted to conquer it, today they tend to listen to it. The director's cinematic odyssey is the result of several years of searching for the secrets of the moose. It leads from Czech forests through a Russian domestication station to the territory of the indigenous peoples of Canada. A collage of stories told from personal, spiritual, and scientific perspectives shows the moose as a guide between worlds, a symbol of balance and renewal, and a possible answer to the question of how we can heal our relationship with nature.

This darkly grotesque drama unfolds on multiple paths. The tangible one, now cruel, now crazy, along which the nomadic actor "Dad Mour", his wife "Mum" and two sons try to return home, but also the imaginary one, even more, tortuous and dusty, on which the often impressive mental youth (or immaturity, a scrooge might say) is welded with life circumstances forcing the protagonist to wise up. An anxious and exuberant cinematic faerie about love, the fear of loneliness and the gaze of sons fixed on their fathers.