2024, Milan. On a cold winter day, I drive aimlessly through the streets of the city, until the unexpected vision of the Grigna captures me, forcing me to return to four years ago, when in the forests my life changed forever. The time of the wolves begins with the archives filmed in March 2020 in an Alpine village: I was 38 years old and, while Italy faced the pandemic, I was trying to hold the pieces of my life together. I had just experienced my third miscarriage and, constantly wavering in my desire for motherhood, I anxiously wondered what was going on in my body.
In those days I made an unexpected discovery, the prelude to my entire journey: during an outing in the woods my partner Juan and I stumbled upon the body of a roe deer lying lifeless with a chasm in its belly. Chasing wolf fantasies began my explorations in the forest. With the sensitive guidance of my dog I learned to pick up and interpret the signs that the wild animals left in the forest, filming what was previously invisible to me. Looking back at these materials today, I realise that the forest has been a fundamental place of research for me, a connection to my innermost parts. These discoveries drive me to search my 20-year film archives for the biographical plots that mark the beginnings of the maternal fantasy to its definition. How does one choose to become a mother, how does one read a desire? In 2021 my son Olmo is born. Childbirth is a wild, animalistic experience. His first year of life is chaotic. Olmo’s elementary needs overwhelm me in a spiral of physical fatigue and planning asphyxia. If before the priority was being a mother, now the problem is how to be one. The inforestment, which Baptiste Morizot theorises in ‘On the Animal Trail’, is again transformed into a process of growth, this time shared with my son, which finally allows me to imagine myself as a mother.
Chiara Brambilla is a director and screenwriter. She made her debut as a director in 2006 with the documentary Casa Plastica. In 2008 she won the Anteprima Doc Festival in Bellaria with the film Uncle Sem and the Bosnian Dream. He won the 2019 MIBACT writing award with the documentary film project Mondo Sommerso. His latest feature films are Divine (2010) and Sciare in salita (2017).