Facing Animals has been chosen as ‘Project of the Month’ on Reelisor.com, an online cooperation platform for the professional European documentary world.
Charlie Philips, jury member and Marketplace Director of Sheffield Doc/fest:
We’re delighted to announce the winner of the first ever Project of The Month on reelisor. The winner is Jan Van Ijken with “Facing Animals” – you can see the project here
It’s a fascinating project with a special pitch video. An investigation into how animals see the world, it’s understated and takes the unusual tactic of literally giving us an animal’s eye view – a bit like Nicolas Philibert’s Nenette did, and this doc looks like it’ll share the non-human intensity of that one, but in Facing Animals, the tables are turned. We’re not observing the non-human animals, we are them! We’re in the chicken coop, we’re in the farmyard, we’re looking at humanity.
It’s not simply looking like a great project because of this device, it’s also the mundanity of the scenes that we’ll get – the row of indifferent men watching, to mirror the general indifference/attitude of functionality to anything not human. in the small amount of info Jan is able to give us in his reelisor project area, you get an excellent sense of the reason this doc needs to exist and of the (enjoyably ambiguous) stance of the filmmaker.
So well done Jan! Jan was picked from a shortlist of 10 entries, whittled down from 51 new projects added on reelisor in August and half of September (so really it was 6 weeks this time, not a month). The standard was very high.
Facing Animals (29 min) is a documentary film about the complex and often bizarre relationship between man and animal.
Why do we look away from millions of animals in industrial farms while pampering and humanizing others? In the film Facing Animals pigs, chickens, cows and dogs are the protagonists, humans are the antagonist.
We see the world from the perspective of the animals: chicks are thrown onto a conveyor belt, a lady is cuddling a cow in a meadow, piglets are screaming while their tails are cut off, dogs are blessed in a church.
The stunning, often confronting, visuals take the viewer on a roller coaster of emotions. It becomes clear how complex and often bizarre the relationship between man and animal is.
2012, HD Video, color, 29:31
Facing Animals was screened at more than 15 international film festivals and received the Grand Prix for short films at Split Film Festival, Croatia.
