Shaving the Pig: Man as Political and Social Animal

As a FIPRESCI juror this year, I focused on the films in competition for the Crystal Globe instead of exploring other sections. This gave me a better appreciation of the strong points and commonalities in the selection made by the festival’s artistic director, Karel Och. Strikingly, ten of the twelve films in competition revolved around the subject of families and the more or less dysfunctional relationships within them. Our prizewinner, Loveable (Elskling), is a precisely written and acted story of divorce. Curiously, another film in the competition, Rude to Love (Ai ni ranbou) by Morigaki Yukihiro, dealt with the same subject, again from the wife’s point of view, while also offering an insight into Japanese society.

This focus on family doesn’t mean that the festival has retreated into Biedermeier themes. On the contrary, the family is very much a political unit, as demonstrated by Georgian director George Sikharulidze’s Panopticon (Panoptikoni). In spite of its slightly overemphasized references to French tradition (Michel Foucault, of course, but also François Truffaut), this was one of the strongest films in the competition, a powerful coming-of-age movie that uncompromisingly shows the tensions between conservatism (religious, nationalist) and the desire for modernity in post-Soviet Georgian society.

Our Lovely Pig Slaughter (Mord) by Czech director Adam Martinec used a family reunion to show the contrasts between the old generation (rural, carnivorous, self-forgetting) and the new (urban, vegetarian, seeking its own happiness). Shot with non-professional actors, the film plunges us into the atmosphere of a Czech farm, where every year a pig has traditionally been killed. Tempi passati, this custom is being repeated for perhaps the last time.

Beata Parkanová’s Tiny Lights (Světýlka), another Czech work in competition, offered, like Martinec’s quasi-documentary film, an immersive family experience. The camera places us at a child’s height for a day: we encounter arguments between adults, blueberry picking, and boredom in the garden… for both the young protagonist and the viewer, although this tedium is probably an intentional part of the experience.

Significantly, all of these films gave pride of place to animals. Animals are by turns nourishment (we learn in Our Lovely Pig Slaughter that you have to shave the pig carefully after killing it before eating it, while in Three Days of Fish we notice that fish bones can spoil the pleasure of eating), sacrifice (notably in the two most political films in competition, Xoftex and Celebration/Proslava), explicitly absent (the lost cat in Rude to Love), innocent companions (the cat in Tiny Lights) and protectors (the sheep and the sow in The Hungarian Dressmaker), or sphinxes guarding the mysteries of perception (the seagull in Mark Cousins’ documentary on painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, which was awarded the Crystal Globe). In any case, animals represent an alternative form of presence to humans, suggesting that we become more modest and pay more attention to our surroundings. In that sense, this year’s festival was an invitation to rethink political engagement within our everyday, familiar environment.

Louise Dumas
Edited by Lesley Chow
© FIPRESCI 2024