National Film Board of Canada Films at ASLE

Elspeth Tulloch, from the Universite Laval in Quebec City, highlighted three important films questioning food industry practices, all of which can be found on the National Film Board of Canada's website: http://onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/home.php

Beef, Inc., Bacon: A Movie, and Animals all focus on the meat industry and its negative consequences, for example, connecting fecal matter and governmental policy. Beef, Inc. and Bacon: A Movie both rely on tropes of unveiling and talking head interviews to demonstrate problems with fecal waste and slaughtering practices. Although the filmmakers for Beef, Inc. did not have access to the slaughter houses, however, the absence of visuals and critical commentary on blood and flesh moved beyond shielding the self from the source of the foods we eat to the shock of absence.

Bacon: A Movie concentrated on the negative effects Quebec hog farming was having on air and water toxicity levels. The hogs are individualized through visuals of artificial insemination and separation from the mother, changing practices in industrial hog farms around Quebec. Contrasting pastoral images devoid of farm animals with shots outside slaughterhouses and images of hogs as food suggested there was no place for connections in this hyper-industrialized era.  

Animals, on the other hand, looks at the everyday slaughter of animals for food on a family farm where the animals are personalized as pets with names before the slaughter. Animals are included in the credits alongside their human filmmaker counterparts, as well, so the sentience of these farm animals is validated. These animals' faces are even reasserted onto the meat after their slaughter. In the film, actual slaughter of a rabbit and a  yearling are shown, but we only hear the filmmaker's acts of killing. The message is ambiguous in animals, but still points to the need to realize our meat comes from sentient beings.

These films work well alongside popular U.S. food films such as Food, Inc. and King Corn, as well as European films such as We Feed the World and Our Daily Bread. That connection comes thanks to Elspeth's introducing us to the films available on the NFB site.