Plot Summary

Jessica Oreck's strange and beguiling film combines Eastern European storybook animation with documentary and fiction elements to recount the Slavic fable of the witch Baba Yaga, a frightful character living in a woodland hut perched on chicken legs. As with her previous documentary hybrids, "Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys" and "Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo", Oreck is fascinated by the rituals, superstitions, and fables of diverse subcultures. In the case of "The Vanquishing", Oreck focuses especially on the contemporary relevance of childhood stories to war and social upheaval; memory and trauma; and our relationship with the natural world, the threat we pose to that world, and the threat that world poses to us.