Geographic exploration, the prehistoric past, and the myth of one of the most gorgeous animals on the planet collide in Lea Harlaub’s engaging documentary sr, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2024.
In this essay-documentary titled sr, German filmmaker Lea Hartlaub created a captivating exploration of the tallest living animal in the world and its unique place in human history. The word “sr” is a hieroglyph found in the ancient Egyptian dictionary for the giraffe, whose oldest ancestor roamed the earth some twenty million years ago. But what makes this 103-minute documentary alluring in terms of its storytelling is that we will not find the word “sr” until the first 50 minutes of its duration, not until we reach the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut. The hieroglyph was found on the northeastern wall of the 3rd terrace on one of the remaining wall blocks. The dictionary of the Egyptian language, which consists of 1,335,810 references, collected by the Egyptologist Adolf Erman and his research team, was published in Berlin in 1926. The hieroglyph of the giraffe, “sr,” according to Erman, means “to announce, to foresee, or to predict.” Hartlaub used the giraffe as a link between different entries of myth, fable, and the prehistoric past of the animal itself, leading us to explore diverse places, cultural varieties, and landscapes around the world.
The film opens with a narration of the giraffe, set somewhere in the African woodlands, that tells us about how this majestic animal communicates across great distances and is not territorial. Then we move to the Port of Eilat in Israel, where the giraffe from Africa arrived after 21 days of travel, as Dorothee Elmiger narrates, “In the 1990s, the veterinarian Motke Levinson travels to South Africa to buy two giraffe couples from a wildlife dealer on behalf of two zoos in Israel and one in the [occupied] Palestinian West Bank.” In its transfer to the zoos, the four giraffes were translocated into one container with one caretaker because giraffes are sensitive, and changes in their environment can cause stress, increasing the risk. But on the second night in the Israeli zoo, after a zookeeper accidentally shines a flashlight into the pen, the cow panics and dies the next day, followed by the bull six weeks later for unknown reasons. Meanwhile, the other bull in Qalqiliya lay dead on the ground during the second Intifada in 2002, and the cow lost her unborn calf, and later in 2007, she died as well, with speculation of poisoning. The deceased giraffes are displayed in the Museum of Natural History, where schools from all over the West Bank use it as a classroom. The bull later is lent out and exhibited as contemporary art in Kassel, Germany, which is described by its Austrian artist as a “fallen animal.” The more Hartlaub tells her essay, the more connecting lines link between geography and history, from the Giraffe Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, to the Philippine Island of Calauit, to the breathtaking landscape of the Turkish village of Üzengili, where Noah’s ark is said to have come to rest lies there.
sr is composed largely of static shots, many of them featuring places and landscapes where the narration leads, implying the magnificence of its epic storytelling and striking cinematography. The film, which consists of 91 images across 30 sites around the world, implies how Hartlaub shows patience and care in telling the story of one creature that should resonate for audiences around the world, a creature most of us couldn’t even imagine. A meticulously observed documentary that soars with its fantastic approach, sr is the kind of film that deserves to be discussed long after the credits start rolling. As the hieroglyph “sr” means to announce, to foresee, or to predict, one of the speakers near the end of the film in the Matoboo hills in Zimbabwe, where we witness cave paintings with giraffes as dominant objects, we learn that in the past, animals weren’t just painted because they looked beautiful; they were painted because of what they meant to the people at that time.
sr had its world premiere in the Tiger Competition at IFFR 2024 and is produced by Meike Martens of Blinker Filmproduktion, with Hartlaub leading as writer, director, DOP, editor, and production manager.
