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Above the Heart NL premiere + Q&A + SHORT
Documentary | Gaëlle Komàr | Belgium | 2011 | 79 min | French spoken | English subtitlesVoorstelling: Saturday 23 March 17:00 | Studio/K 2
At the break of dawn, when the city is still asleep, the lights in the local slaughterhouse are turned on. Animals are brought in, men in white suits arrive and machines begin to whir. It is a new day in which a confrontational series of images and sound form a hypnotic whole.
Above the Heart leaves nothing to the imagination. The viewer is a witness to the slaughter, as the machines perform their dance of death. Only the cows’ death throes provide any variation to the morbid repetition. Through a maze of machinery, we follow cows and pigs as they are turned into sausages, roulades or tartar. At each step of the process is a machine that cuts, brushes, steams, pushes and pulls controlled by a – still vital – human hand.
From the blood-spattered slaughterhouse we visit a trade fair where men in smart suits inspect the latest developments in slaughter technology. It won’t be long before these intelligent machines make humans obsolete. Who wants to work in slaughterhouse conditions anyway? ‘Finding good employees is getting increasingly difficult,’ says a seller at the fair. These advanced machines are the future, enabling our meat to be processed faster and ever more efficiently.
Above the Heart raises a host of questions about our food system and how we want to shape it. Not a film for the squeamish, but the masterful camerawork makes the carcasses and entrails look almost beautiful. By the end of the day, blood has turned the green floor a bright red, almost like paint on a canvas. It is hosed down, the lights are turned off and the city goes back to sleep. Tomorrow is new day.
PLEASE NOTE: Joël Godfroid, the co-producer and second camera of Above the Heart, will be present after the screening for a Q&A. This film is preceded by an FFF SHORT...
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Happy Meat Animation I Marc ter Horst | Netherlands | 2012 | 1 min | While the meat industry deliberately creates products in which the animals they are made of are indiscernable, the toy industry simplifies and exaggerates animal characteristics into caricature. Happy Meat combines the efficiency, functionality and aesthetics of both worlds in a rather uncanny hybrid. |
La main au-dessus du niveau du coeur - Above the heart from Gaëlle Komàr on Vimeo.
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