Smathers Library was quiet Tuesday evening except for the Russian and Polish murmurs coming from the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica.
Jessica Oreck, a New York-based director, showed her third film, “The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga,” to a room of about 70 students and professors during a free showing.
The partly animated documentary told the Slavic folklore of Baba Yaga and highlighted Eastern European landscapes and life.
Oreck was invited by John Cech, UF English professor and director for the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature and Culture, who had seen her first film.
Oreck said she was inspired to create the film in 2008 and solidified the idea during her travels in Eastern Europe. She listened to stories from Romanian poets about escaping to the woods to collect mushrooms, where they talked about life under Communist politician Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule.
“I thought I was going to make a movie about mushroom collecting in Eastern Europe,” Oreck said. “To them, it wasn’t about the mushrooms. It was about the gesture of returning to the woods.”
She traveled to five countries in Eastern Europe to make the film, which premiered in April 2014. It has since played in film festivals around the world, including Australia, Singapore and Moscow.
The crowd was mostly students.
“It was really interesting to be able to look at folktales through a different lens, rather than through a book,” said Rebecca Vitkus, a 20-year-old UF English senior.
The film will be shown next at the Alamo Draft House in Austin.
“As long as people are willing to see it, I’m willing to keep talking about it,” Oreck said.
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 1/14/2015 under the headline “Slavic folklore-based film screened at Smathers Library"]
Filmmaker Jessica Oreck welcomes UF students to the screening and Q-and-A of "The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga" in the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica at UF on Tuesday.
