NAYA - DER WALD HAT TAUSEND AUGEN

Documentary | 24' | 2021

The short documentary NAYA – Der Wald hat tausend Augen follows the life of Naya, a wolf that walked from eastern Germany to Belgium tagged with a GPS collar. The first wolf in Belgium in a hundred years, she suddenly makes headlines – but then her presence takes a mysterious turn. This voyeuristic visual collage of wildlife and surveillance camera imagery captivatingly explores the relationship between humans and this iconic wild animal.

Even by just taking the disembodied point of view of automatic cameras, ‘Naya’ covers an almost incredible amount of ground, and not only geographically: in addition to the relationship between humans, nature and technology, it deals with the effects of commercialism and capitalism, with animals' rights and the increasingly hard-to-justify issue of hunting. But most pointedly it deals with the elusive cushiness of the civilisation that we've built in the West and how we've forgotten that real nature still exists around us.
Read the full review by Talking Shorts here.


NAYA is a coproduction with the Evangelische Omroep (EO), The Netherlands Film Fund and the CoBO Fund.

Director: Sebastian Mulder
Producer: [boondocs]: Jasper Boon
Sound Design: Jacob Oostra
Editor: Nina Graafland
Composer: Eren Önsoy
Motion Graphics: Amos Mulder
Grading: Michiel Rummens
Post-Production: Amator, Jan Jaap Kuiper
Research: Bente Mars
Line-producer: Bente Mars
Poster Design: Peter van Langen

Festival Distributor: Wouter Jansen / Square Eyes


You can watch the film on the videoplatform of The New Yorker.

Dutch viewers can watch the film here.



FESTIVALS & AWARDS

Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen
National Competition Special Mention
Hot Docs International Documentary
Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts
Short Documentary Competition Special Mention
VIENNA SHORTS – International Short Film Festival

Special Mention
Aegean Film Festival
Best Short Film Award
DOKUFEST 
Sarajevo Film Festival
Go Short Arnhem
Golden Deer Award
Helsinki International Film Festival
Lille International Short Film Festival
Guanajuato International Film Festival
Nederlands Film Festival
PROVINZIALE – Filmfest Eberswalde
CineEco – International Environmental Film Festival of Serra da Estrela
Kaohsiung Film Festival 
Special Mention
EKOFILM International Film Festival
Film Festival Cologne
Valladolid International Film Festival
Un Festival C’Est Trop Court
West Lake International Documentary Festival
Uppsala Short Film Festival
FestCurtasBH – Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival
Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur

Prix George For The Best Documentary Form
Ljubljana International Film Festival
Rencontres Internationales Du Documentaire De Montréal
Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival

A38 Production-Grant Kassel-Halle
Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival
Festival Dei Popoli
dokumentART
Latücht Award given by the MV Filmförderung
Kortfilmfestival Leuven
Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival
Hishorts! Xiamen Short Film Festival
Vilnius International Short Film Festival

Best Short Film Award
Premiers Plans Film Festival
Big Sky Documentary Film Festival
Dhaka International Short and Independent Film Festival
Tampere Film Festival
Pendance Film Festival
Glasgow Short Film Festival