SONS OF BORA

SONS OF BORA – A story about the return of the Karst shepherd to the ancient border between man and wolf

SONS OF BORA is about a Karst shepherd named Karst who becomes a herding dog. The film follows him from his birth through his early education with his breeder Emil, who uses an ancient shepherd-teaching method to prepare him to take over a herd of his own someday. After two months he’s taken in by the Kržič family whose Karst shepherd was killed on a pasture by a bear a year earlier. There he’s taken over by Jožef, a young boy with a great gift for working with dogs who fully trains him as a shepherd dog in one year. There’s a parallel story about another Slovenian son of bora—a Slovenian wolf. The viewer is led into the wolf world by a renowned Slovenian biologist Dr. Miha Krofel who studies wolves all over Europe. We follow Dr. Krofel to Austria, Germany and all the way to Trentino in Italy where the most famous Slovenian wolf Slavc has moved after walking over a thousand kilometres. Slavc has formed a wolf pack on the Lessinia Plateau, which means that the European Central Alps are populated with wolves for the first time after 130 years.

The story about Karst and Slavc pays homage to the last Slovenian native breed—the Karst shepherd—and is simultaneously the film’s authors’ response to the pressures of Slovenian politics that tried to decimate the Slovenian wolf population in 2019.