Amma, Do Giraffes Cry?

Far away from home, an Indian filmmaker calls his zoologist mother from the Prague Zoo. As he describes the mysterious lives of the captive animals he observes - a gorilla scared of cameras, an insomniac anaconda and penguins haunted by their own shadows-the zoo becomes a space for their memories to materialise.The distance between mother and son, human and animal evaporates, and the zoologist confronts long held belief.

Kartikeya Saxena, born in the desert state of Rajasthan, is an Indian filmmaker and cinematographer based in Prague. Growing up around folklore and oral tradition, he developed an early sensitivity to landscape and its ability to retain human and natural memory. Working at the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, his films are constructed as a mosaic of images and sounds in which themes and ideas of memory, ecology, postcolonialism, and architecture intersect.