Film Screening & Conversation

The Weight of the Wild

In 2014, the Romanian town of Armeniș became a site for rewilding Europe’s largest land mammal, the European bison. A decade later, the project lead by WeWilder Campus and WWF Romania, has done more than bring the bison back: it revived the land. A proposed highway route puts a decade of work at risk. Join us for the screening of the short documentary film The Weight of the Wild, and a conversation on how lived ecological change can be translated into forms legible to institutions.

“To count the blades of grass and to count the bees is, well…, rather ambitious.”

The project by WeWilder Campus and WWF Romania has succesfully sparked a broader socio-economic transformation that fosters local economic growth, reduces dependence on waged labour and city-bound migration, and enables a revival of making a living from the land. However a proposed highway route crossing through the mountains puts a decade of patient work at risk. To reroute the highway away from the bison’s habitat and the agricultural community the project must recast its achievements as ‘measurable value’ into the spreadsheet economics of the Ministry of Transport.

This film covers conversations with the two remarkable women at the heart of the WeWilder initiative. Their insights describe how to walk the thin line between a regenerative way of life and the pressure of economic development – it’s never either/or, it’s always both/and. Their enduring presence and unwavering commitment have earned the community’s trust. Cadence, insistence and permanence: the alchemical recipe for a collective future.

Join us for a screening of The Weight of the Wild, by Nathaniel Bockley and Andrea Leiter, in collaboration with WeWilder. Following the film, co-director and researcher Andrea Leiter will be in conversation with WeWilder co-founder Oana Mondoc, reflecting on how lived ecological change is translated into forms legible to institutions. The conversation will be moderated by Vladimir Bogoeski.

Speakers

Oana Mondoc is a troublemaker and maker of innovative, scalable solutions that realign and restore our relationship with nature and ecosystems. In a decade of working alongside global experts, national and international projects in the panda family (WWF), she has seen just how much of the science and the strategies remains in theoretical circles and on papers in drawers. In response, together with a passionate collective of experts in many fields she is rocking the boat on the ground, in a biodiversity hot-spot in Europe.

Andrea Leiter is the Director of the Amsterdam Center for International Law. Her work explores global inequality and transnational governance through private actors in the digital economy. Trained in international law, she examines how questions of value, ownership, and justice structure our relationship to land and community. Her current research project, ‘(Re)coding Values in the Digital Economy’, is funded by the Dutch Research Council VENI grant. Alongside her academic work, she has co-developed ecological and social justice initiatives at the intersection of law, economics and technology.

Vladimir Bogoeski (moderator) is Assistant Professor in European Private Law. He is currently leading the NWO Veni project Towards Just Food Production in the Green Transition: Law and the Making of Sustainable Labour Relations from Below (2024–2027). His research sits at the intersection of private law, food systems, and the political economy of labour, examining how private law structures work relations in sustainable food systems through critical approaches including law and political economy, economic sociology of law, participatory action research, and law and social movements.