‘Amoosed’ Director Tracked Her Creature for Years

Hana Novakova, a documentarian and ethnozoologist, says she first became obsessed — her word — with the moose when a remarkable event transpired in the Czech Republic.

“It all started in 2003 when I first heard the story of the unbelievable spontaneous return of the moose population to my homeland, the Czech Republic, after 500 years of them being extinct here,” she tells Variety.

Five years later, while studying at Prague’s venerated FAMU film school, her interest hadn’t lessened a bit — leading her, after a tortuous but relentless trek, to this week’s world premiere of “Amoosed” in the Ji.hlava doc fest’s Czech Joy section.

Determination was indeed needed: funders were not too receptive to her pitch, Novakova says, and COVID lockdowns were on the horizon, preventing her from filming abroad.

“And yet again, the following diplomatic crisis between the Czech Republic and Russia in 2021 plus the war Russia started a year later made further filming in Russia impossible.”

With moose sightings in the Czech Republic still extremely rare, Novakova had tracked down a Russian nature preserve in the Kostroma region that raised the majestic ungulates (and that had once served as an anti-rocket defense installation).

“The first time I was able to see the moose in the wild was in Russia, in the domestication station where they let them roam freely.”

The Russian team had also managed to establish a way to extract milk from a moose by having them exposed to humans at birth, rather than allowing them to be raised by their mothers.

She visited the area in 2016 and recorded some material, later used in “Amoosed,” but the expedition was intended as more of a scouting trip, she says.

But with the war, her plans to return years later were off the table.

“It forced us to use much more material from the scouting than we…