2024
Short film
Short film
A spectre is haunting the city - a spectre of a cryptic ghost. In the liminal, neglected areas of Ljubljana, lurks the spectre of a striped hyena - a ghost of an animal that fled from the travelling menagerie in 1898. After her escape she managed to lurk around the periphery of the city for several months, scaring and confusing the locals with her presence. In the end, she was shot in the Rašica forest and transformed into an exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Slovenia. Now she stands there, frozen in an awkward pose, small fragile body and glass eyes full of fear with a large bloody bone placed in her mouth by the taxidermist to enhance the animal's perceived ferocity.
This eerie spectre, a combination of historical facts and speculative myths, serves as a representation of forgotten futures and lingering histories. While the ghost of the hyena moves through the unsettling, in-between areas of the city—empty malls, deserted underpasses—time starts to come apart at the seams. These spaces, originally designed only as a passage, become places where the distinctions between past, present, and future disappear.
The haunting hyena confronts the discomfort as she walks in the unsettling reality of a planet on the verge of environmental catastrophe. While navigating the urban landscape, the hyena merges with ghosts of alternate possibilities. The balance between utopia and dystopia has been disrupted and the once open future has been abandoned and replaced with certainty.
The fear of a ghost originates from the unfamiliar, which is necessary for a transformation - a feeling of uncertainty. The future visions it conjures up are not predictions. These possibilities exist to disrupt our complacent dystopia. The future's images are just as influential in shaping the present as the past, with the hyena presence in both. When opening up the future for new stories and agents we can resurrect the ghost into new realities.