LUPA

LUPA is an investigative short film that takes an ancient work of art (the Capitoline Wolf) and its path through history as the occasion to visualise its ideologically charged meaning that exists up to the present-day.
Spread all over the world, this mythical symbol associated with the foundation of Rome is the most common non-serially produced monument. In Romania alone, there are 22 examples of this Roman statue.
The reception of the original and the reproductions is also a theme of the movie. Here the reproduction, seen ideologically, is a substitute for the original. It is not the artistic value that counts, but the historic importance. From an artistic point of view, the original Capitoline Wolf is currently experiencing the opposite: de-mystification triggered by doubts as to its provenance.
Refusing to be a passive symbol, the wolf herself narrates her own history.

"The film unfolds on multiple temporal and narrative planes: the historical research combines with a fictional register intended to lend representation to historic episodes that have shaped the development of this iconic symbol of identity: the animal that saves and nurtures the twins Romulus and Remus. The Lupa belongs to everybody and nobody; it is a copy without an original, whose capacity to endure and adapt leads it to embrace sometimes divergent, even contradictory meanings.
But Aurelia Mihai goes further than this: her impulse to archive and the accuracy of her historical research combine with an animistic interpretation of this cultural sign. Quite early on in the film we discover that the voiceover narrative which accompanies the foray into history is that of the she-wolf herself. She refuses to become a passive symbol, she narrates her own history, and, furthermore, she chooses to insert herself into the texture of the present in concrete ways.
One of the most interesting moments of the film, one in which the narrative flow is suspended, comes when we see a little boy who has lost his mother and is wandering through the galleries of the Capitoline Museums in Rome, where the earliest version of the she-wolf is kept (thought to be the original up until just a few years ago). The encounter between the venerable marble artefacts and the curious gaze of a child discovering the world is a sequence in which myth and reality intertwine. The camera lingers on the marble figures one by one, on figures from ancient myth that do not possess the global resonance of the Lupa.
When the camera finally arrives in the room where the Lupa is kept, we see that there is not one boy, as we originally thought, but two, and that they are twins. We also realise that the Lupa is not just an object in a museum, but exerts a magical power over the present, continuing her story. "
(Magda Radu)