Give us this day Our Daily Bread

Dear theatres, especially Austin theatres: Please play this movie. It isn’t going to be easy, we are going to have to drag ourselves into the seats and we may walk out with numb faces and tortured souls, but we need to watch, learn, and be reminded of what it is like to be a human animal in the 21^st century.

First, let me tell you an anecdote from RadioLab: American zoos very rarely feed whole animals to their big cats, and they almost never feed them live animals. In one segment, Nell Boyce attends a new event at the Toledo Zoo wherein a cow carcass is fed to some tigers. She was struck, as was I, with the number of children having the exact same conversation with their parents:

“What is the big kitty eating?”
“That’s a cow, honey.”
“Why is it eating a cow?”
“Because that’s what it eats. You eat cows too, you know.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do, sweetie, your hamburger is made of cow.”
“Oh.”

This disconnection from the food we eat and the processes by which we obtain it is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, and a documentary film which is (hopefully) on its way to a screen near you is trying to rebuild this connection, complete with all of the modernized horror we’ve been missing.

How can I be in love with a film I’ve never seen? Why have I been longing to see it so desperately, on a big screen, ever since I found out about it over a year ago? Is it the classy marketing materials, the impossibly subtle trailers which only hint at the intensity of what this little documentary is trying to do? Is it because it’s an “art film” in a world of documentaries, or because it is a documentary in a world of clever indie films which have oh so much to say about the human condition? Is it because it is about photography, and food, and human ingenuity, and ecology, and consumerism, and class, and nature, and science? Is it because it discusses all of these things without uttering a word … forcibly restricting any dialogue to whatever might be going on in the viewer’s head at the time? It is because I know it will be horribly graphic in a way that slasher movies never even imagined, because PETA was nowhere in sight during the filming, because it will almost certainly send tears to my eyes as I slowly come to understand that this is what humanity has come to, at last, and it can only get worse, and all the while reminding myself that if I don’t eat a ham sandwich before the movie I’ll be hungry and that this hunger will distract me from fully appreciating what is happening on the screen in front of me, all of these images of food, no, wait, that was alive once, is it food or is it life, when does it change from one to the other, and does that machine with the sharp blades have anything to do with it?