LUPA, is a cinematic experiment that allows an ancient masterpiece, the Lupa Capitolina, to tell its own story. A monument speaks. At the same time the film both constructs and deconstructs the monument. The meditation on cultural appropriation and the avatars of this mysterious mechanism that ricochet within globally ramifying constructs of identity form the subject of the artist’s most recent film, LUPA. The title refers to the famous Lupa Romana: a sculpture of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf, a work that embodies the mythical foundation of Rome and, implicitly, Latinity. Drawing on painstaking historical and anthropological research, Aurelia Mihai traces the incredible spread of this symbol, the reproduction and erection of versions of it in various corners of the world, and also the types of significations attached to it in the contexts within which it is inserted. The film unfolds on multiple temporal and narrative planes: the historical research combines with a fictional register intended to lend representation to historic episodes that have shaped the development of this iconic symbol of identity: the animal that saves and nurtures the twins Romulus and Remus. The Lupa belongs to everybody and nobody; it is a copy without an original, whose capacity to endure and adapt leads it to embrace sometimes divergent, even contradictory meanings. It can be viewed as a symbol of the independence and emancipation of national states or, on the contrary, as an element of belonging to traditional alliances arising from the spread of fascism.