Filmmaker Elke Duerr will screen her feature-length documentary, “Stories of Wolves: The Lobo Returns” at 6 p.m. Sunday in the Light Hall Theater on the WNMU campus.
A question-and-answer session with Duerr will follow the screening and she will tell stories from her field work with the wolves. Suggested donation at the door is $10. The event is open to the public.
Duerr visited Aldo Leopold Charter School Wednesday morning and screened a shorter version of the film for students.
“The 12-minute version is more conducive for the school setting,” Duerr said. “The students were very interested in the story of the wolves and their struggles.” Duerr said her film is a balanced presentation of the struggle of the wolf, and covers the perspectives of both the rancher and the conservationist.
Duerr, who resides in Whitefish, Montana, is also a writer and photographer, and used to be a speech language pathologist in Albuquerque.
“For thousands of years we have heard how bad wolves are,” Duerr said. “I am telling the story of co-existence, the story of how people have learned to survive with wolves. I believe the eco-system works when it is complete, with wolves and cattle, ranchers and conservationists.”
She calls this holistic approach to ecology “the web of life.”
Duerr says her interest in wolves began when she was a child in Germany.
“I grew up on organic farm, and my grandfather once showed me piece of land he called ‘the wolf trap,’ and he said that was where the farmers had killed last of the wolves. He said it like he was proud of it, but I wasn’t,” Duerr said. “Nobody had asked me, as a child, what I thought of that,” she adds with a laugh.
However, the wolves had the last laugh. “The wolves came back by themselves after fall of Berlin Wall,” Duerr said. “When the wall came down, the wolves came through too.”
Duerr has lived in New Mexico since 1988, and she said for the last few years she has been splitting her time between Montana and New Mexico.
“I am working on documentary about last wild Bison in Montana,” she said.
Her film, “Stories of Wolves,” has been screened at the Poulson Film Festival in Montana and the LA Cine Fest in Los Angeles, as well as been submitted to the online green film festival, Culture Unplugged.
Her other films include 2014’s “Wolves and Humans: A Story of Co-existence,” 2015’s short film “Bison Nation” and 2011’s “Preserving Beauty,” a about a rancher who used to live in Faywood.
Since Duerr is an independent filmmaker, her funding comes from a variety of sources, she said.
“It’s little bit of everything, sometimes grants, sometimes crowd funding,” she explained. She has also received a contract from the New Mexico Film Office to help with funding for “Stories of Wolves,” which included her performing outreach around the state about filmmaking.
“That is what got me going into the schools,” she said.
The Aldo Leopold students were more interested in the wolves than in filmmaking, Duerr said.
“They really wanted to know about the wolves,” she said. “A lot of them had seen a wolf in the wild, and we do live in wolf country down here.”
For more information on Duerr’s work, visit her website, weboflifefoundation.net.
Source: Filmmaker to screen documentary ‘Stories of Wolves’ on Sunday