Projects
The Future is an Elder Cow
In a small town ravaged by infertility, rumours spread that women started giving birth to animals.
In a small farming town, between the mountains and the sea, no child has been born for the last eight years. Humanity’s inexplicable infertility has been pushing locals to old healing remedies. Meanwhile, rumours are spreading within the community about pregnant women giving birth to animals. Lara and Marco’s marriage is in crisis. 45-year-old Lara has just discovered that she is pregnant. Her baby is a calf and 40-year-old Marco wants her to have an abortion. With the help of the town’s obstetrician and vet, Lara embraces her hidden quest to become a mother and find new ways to connect with nature and animals. Marco’s brother and his wife are the parents of the town’s last child, 8-year-old Baltha. Nobody knows that Baltha’s mother has also given birth to a baby wolf kept well-hidden at home. When Baltha tells Lara of his mother’s secret, Lara decides to reveal her pregnancy to the community and challenge people’s perception on motherhood.
The film is set in a familiar yet non-specific location and time, where humans have, despite their efforts, unexpectedly stopped propagating. Instead, they stand as defeated witnesses of cases of pregnant women giving birth to mammals. Focusing on micro-scale relations, the film unravels a community stuck between its traditional past and its hopeless future. Within this clash of progress and failure, "The Future is an Elder Cow" presents a world in transition that lingers between the social and the taboo, the maternal and the animalistic. Approaching such a concept through fiction and naturalism, the film hopes to stand as an existential allegory on our failure to acknowledge animals as equal beings on this planet. The urgency I feel for this topic is one that I cannot separate from the ecological crisis of our times. However, my interest is not a didactic one. I aim at proposing an authentic, mythical universe that is both familiar and odd, in which the coexistence of humans and nature is in turmoil.
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