Leviathan in Context: An Interview with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

The following essay/ interview ran in a slightly different form in now-defunct Canadian film journal Cineaction, under the title The Aesthetics of Slaughter: Leviathan in Context. With at least one film in the 2017 VIFF calling into question the killing and eating of animals - Bong Joon Ho's remarkable Okja; a new, final film from Michael Glawogger, whose Workingman's Death is considered at length below, and a new film from Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, Caniba - inquiring into the killing and eating of humans (!) - it seemed a good time to put this interview out into the world again.

I seem to have misplaced my footnotes, but I hope no one really cares.

The Aesthetics of Slaughter: Leviathan in Context
An Interview with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

By Allan MacInnis

One of the most remarkable recent films to show the workings of a slaughterhouse is Michael Glawogger’s 2005 film Workingman’s Death, the centerpiece of which is footage shot at a Nigerian open-air marketplace/ abattoir. There, workers and customers happily socialize and haggle whilst cows and goats, throats slit, bleed out into the dirt. Workers haul the heads, skins, and meat of slaughtered animals through crowds, over blood-soaked mud; no one reacts with horror. Nowhere is the western desire to deny or sanitize death and suffering in evidence; in fact, quite a different attitude towards animal death applies. As Glawogger explains on the commentary,

the slaughtering in the culture of Nigeria is something very normal and simple, and they wouldn’t even like to buy the meat when they didn’t see the cow. They wouldn’t like - they wouldn’t even do it - to buy the goat when they don’t see the lively goat, and when they don’t see the goat was healthy and the goat was worth buying.

These attitudes are remarkably different from the prevailing ones in North America, where, as animal liberation advocate Peter Singer puts it, meat is presented in “neat plastic packages,” as the “culmination of a long process, of which all but the end product is delicately screened from our eyes” (95). The unfamiliarity of Glawogger’s images, and the challenge they present to the viewer to honestly, openly embrace (or at least acknowledge) the suffering that goes into the production of meat, lend them a fascination that would likely be lacking in a film produced with more polemical intent. There is, as Glawogger puts it, “a strange mixture of brutality and beauty” to the footage, which makes it “watchable” and “gripping,” “because I’m never tired to see that… I always see something new in it. It opens my thoughts.”

This is a response quite different from the one engendered by the sort of films produced by animal rights activists to horrify the viewer into swearing off the eating of meat; such films do not seek to “open thoughts” but to produce a desired effect on the viewer (usually the swearing-off of animal products). While such films have generally not been received as cinema, there is a growing body of films like Glawogger’s, which are almost as bloody, in seeking to show the reality behind the “neat plastic packages” of the grocery store. While equally aimed at breaking down barriers of denial, such films often have a dispassionate or aestheticizing quality to them, which allows the viewer space to contemplate the realities at hand from some safe distance. Such is the case with the first classic of the form, Georges Franju’s 1949 documentary Blood of the Beasts - reportedly shot in black and white because Franju felt that showing such images in colour would be “too much to take” (http://theseventhart.info/tag/slaughterhouse-in-movies/).   

Blood of the Beasts is available as an extra on the Criterion DVD of Franju's noirish horror film Eyes Without a Face. While a harrowing experience to anyone unaccustomed to images of slaughter, the film need not lead viewers to the conclusion that “meat is murder;” it simply refuses to allow them to lie to themselves about how meat is produced.

Often in these films - as is the case with Franju, with Frederick Wiseman’s Meat (1976), or with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 film In A Year of 13 Moons - social criticism is intended, but this criticism is aimed at targets larger than the abbatoir per se. Meat depicts both animals and workers as pawns in a relentless human institution that is indifferent to the feelings of both, connecting the film to Wiseman’s other documentaries on North American institutions. Writing on the Fassbinder film, Ronald Hayman notes that its slaughterhouse sequence “is both a piece of cruelty to the audience and a statement about human cruelty,” which will serve to call to mind concentration camps later in the film (78). Concentration camps were also seen as an unsubtle subtext to the Franju film, our inhumanity to animals standing as a cipher for our inhumanity to fellow humans. 

 

A more recent documentary, which takes in both meat production and contemporary agribusiness, Our Daily Bread (2005) strives to trouble the viewer with the alienated/ alienating conditions and technology that animals and workers face, but with more of an aesthetic than political motivation; one watches the film not in horror, but fascination, marveling at the bizarre tableaus presented, which seem more the stuff of science fiction than daily life.

Perhaps the most provocative film to deal with slaughterhouses is Zev Asher’s remarkable 2004 documentary Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat, sadly neglected when this article first saw print in Cineaction, and now, with Asher’s death, rendered quite difficult to see. The film, again, is not merely an act of advocacy for animal rights, but asks larger questions: is killing an animal in the pursuit of an artistic objective ever acceptable? (And, if not, given that we kill them routinely for food, why not?). What if killing that animal is part of a project designed to call into question the modern day consumption of meat? And what should be done with artists who do choose to engage in such a project? Are they actually threats to public safety (or simply to our state of daily denial)? 

The film centres on Jesse Power, a Toronto arts student, who was apparently sincerely disturbed by the ways the killing and consumption of animals is taken for granted in society, so much so that he had, at various points, filmed himself killing and eating a chicken, experimented with vegetarianism, and, ultimately, gotten a job in a slaughterhouse. He and two friends conceived of an art project where they killed a stray cat and filmed it, to try to understand what killing an animal meant; however, stoned and incompetent, they ended up torturing the cat slowly to death, while capturing the entire procedure on video. When the footage was discovered and called to the attention of authorities, it set off a lengthy and controversial animal cruelty trial (and very vocal displays of outrage on the part of animal rights activists, who dubbed the nameless cat Kensington, after the area where it had been caught. 

Asher’s documentary - which allows Power and one of his collaborators to speak for themselves, and explain what they had been thinking - also proved highly controversial when it screened, resulting in Asher - a self-described cat lover, who played none of the video footage of the cat’s death in his film - receiving death threats from people who had not seen the film, but presumed he was taking Power’s side. A Toronto screening of the film which Power attended drew protests and a near riot; the film was also selected for screening by the SPCA in New York for the insight it afforded into animal cruelty cases.

(My interview with Zev Asher about his work, including this film, is viewable online here. https://alienatedinvancouver.blogspot.ca/2014/02/the-zev-asher-memorial-interview.html)   

Leviathan, the newest major film to take on the suffering of animals and humans in the production of food, also has Glawogger’s “strange mixture of brutality and beauty,” which makes it compelling and repeatedly watchable despite the difficulty of some of its images. (It also has been likened, like Our Daily Bread, to science fiction and, indeed, horror cinema - what might be glibly dubbed torture porn for fish). Shot on and around a fishing trawler off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts - the former whaling town from which the Pequod departs, in Moby Dick - the aestheticizing element in the film has much to do with the innovative technology employed by directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Labs. Eschewing narration, and shot using miniature GoPro sports cameras, incorporating footage shot by the subjects - fishermen - themselves, and containing moments where the camera floats, apparently free of all control, among dead fish, the film has the excitement of the new to it; it is clearly an innovative and intimate approach to its subject matter. Almost all of the ample writing on the film to date features a pun on the term “immersive” - referring both to the amount of time the camera spends either on or beneath the surface of the water, and to the narration-free immediacy of the film’s images, which - comparable to the work of Stan Brakhage or to Werner Herzog’s Lessons In Darkness - transform a mundane, much-filmed activity, industrial fishing, into something apocalyptic and unfamiliar.

While animal suffering is very much in evidence in Leviathan - from the bulging, dead eyes of fish hauled from the depths to the gasping catch dying of suffocation on the ship’s deck - there is also a strange humour to the film, and a greater degree of compassion for the fishermen than one might expect. Both qualities are in evidence in a sequence where one of the fishermen nods off while watching a reality-TV show about fishing. The scene is presented in a lengthy, static shot which itself may lull viewers towards sleep, only to suddenly realize that they have become a mirror image for the blinking, nodding, exhausted fisherman slumped on the opposite side of the screen. Unsettling as Leviathan’s images may be, the film is no mere polemic - though it would be entirely reasonable to swear off eating fish after seeing it.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel spoke to CineAction from Boston, on a speakerphone hookup so both filmmakers could react to questions, prior to a Vancouver screening of Leviathan. Thanks to the Georgia Straight, who previously ran a greatly abbreviated version of this interview, and to Steve Chow and Jasmine Pauk, for facilitating it.

A: Congratulations on the reception that Leviathan has received. It seems to really be striking a chord with critics. I’m curious if it’s exceeded your expectations?

V: I don’t think we had any expectations.

L : We had no idea what to expect.

V: We were hoping that the fishermen would like the film, but -

L : - we didn’t know what anybody else would think.

A: Were the fishermen wary - thinking you might be making an activist-oriented eco-horror doc along the lines of The End of the Line?

L: I think so, before they got to know us. Fishermen feel marginalized and scapegoated and blamed for the lack of sustainability of fish stocks. The cause is really poor regulation, on the part of different governments, more than it is the fishermen themselves. But once they got to know us - they’re engaged in this really grueling activity out at sea, and I think they were happy to have a couple of greenhorns along to give them something different for a few voyages.

A: Did they enjoy your “greenness?” I gather both of you got sick, and that Véréna - you were sort of battered about and had to be hospitalized a couple of times?

V (laughs): Yeah!

A: How were they with that? Amused, supportive?

V : I don’t know. Not amused… I think when I was really in bad shape I was trying to be very discreet about it. But no, they were not amused. The captain didn’t seem really concerned, but he was helping - giving me some medication to sooth my pain… I was expecting them to be more amused by Lucien being seasick, but actually they were kind with that too, and completely understanding, because some of them, even after long years of being a fishermen, some of them are still seasick, and they know how hard it was and how painful it is, so they were very understanding with us.

A: Did you have any preconceptions of what the fishermen would be like, which were changed by being on the boat with them?

V: No, we discussed with them before, and we met them when the boat was at dock. So we didn’t know what to expect, but we had a couple of conversations with the captain, and we had some agreement that if something happened to us, he wouldn’t go back on land for us… so we knew that it was a rough environment, a labour-intensive environment. I think we were intellectually ready for that. I don’t know if physically we were that ready for that, but we went through with it.

A: Did you have ecological themes in mind when you began? I gather the film changed a lot, that you shot 50 hours of footage on land, and that it was radically transformed by the experience of going out to sea… I wonder how much of what we see emerged from ideas you had before you set out on the ship, and how much of what we see comes entirely from the experience…?

V: I think we didn’t have any preconceived idea! Maybe something more beyond the image… I think the whole film comes from our experience at sea. And the only conceptual criteria that we had before was to share the camera with the fishermen, or a very small idea about how we can film when we were on the boat. We were basically projecting things, but it was more like - we wanted to do a film where there was a real engagement with them and they’re also engaged in the film and in filming with us and in sharing ideas with us. It was more this kind of idea that we had rather than having a preconceived idea of the visuals, how it would look like… so the aesthetic came out of the experience, the fear, the engagement of being at sea in the middle of the Atlantic.

L: I would certainly agree with everything that Véréna just said, but - we had a negative preconception, we tried to work without preconceptions. We tried to do everything while we were doing the filming, rather than vetting a subject beforehand and knowing what we wanted to say about it. So we were discovering as we went along, and the most powerful experiences we had were indeed the ones we had on the boat, rather than on land. There’s no profession that has been more filmed and more photographed than fishing, since the beginning of photography, since the beginning of cinema, and if we were going to make yet another film about fishing, we didn’t want to do another romantic portrait of fishing, or a typical kind of liberal PBS TV-documentary portraying different constituencies as victims of X, Y, and Z. We wanted a different kind of experience and a different kind of film, but we didn’t know what that would be like until we were out on the boat filming.

A: Maybe it’s my own preconceptions that are at work here, but… I sort of imagine that two Harvard professors, and a group of fishermen, there was a class divide…?

L: We’re not trying to be defensive about this, but even the lowliest deckhand takes home more money at the end of the year than a salaried professor, at least at our level at Harvard does. So the class differences - there are differences of class and differences of culture and of nation, and certainly gender, for Véréna - but the class differences aren’t as pronounced as one might imagine, per se. Also, the fishermen are intellectuals - in different ways, and in different degrees, but they know more about their world and the political economy of fishing and how that’s changed over the last half-century than we will ever know, no matter how much research we do. We didn’t have much to teach them, they had a hell of a lot to teach us…!

A: Am I correct that your family background involved fishing…?

Lucien: Not really! My background was in shipping; my father was a boat-builder. I went fishing as a kid, but not industrial fishing. Véréna used to go diving with her father; he was a scuba-diver. So we both have different relationships with the ocean. We wanted to do something local, to do something close to Boston; we were fed up with having to travel great distances, and we were interested in doing something that related to our autobiographical experience, but not in any direct way.

A: Do you both eat meat and fish…?

V: Raw meat and raw fish! (Laughs).

A: Raw meat?

L: We eat more fish than the fishermen do, we can tell you that much!

A: I’m also a meat-eater [note: as of 2017, no longer], but I’ve always found slaughterhouse footage fascinating, in films like Blood of the Beasts or Workingman’s Death, because we’re looking at images that are suppressed, unseen, getting behind the denial of death in our culture… I found the images on the “killing floor” of the fishing boat quite remarkable for the reason, where we’re swirling about with the guts and the fish heads - I found that really exciting to see, cinematically. I don’t really understand my excitement at that - I feel like I should be horrified, but cinematically, it’s so new and fresh…    

L: I don’t know if anyone else has suggested Workingman’s Death as a connection before. Certainly we’ve read a few reviews that mention Franju’s Blood of the Beasts and Stan Brakhage’s films. But - it’s not that we’re trying to disavow any influences, but as we were filming, other than trying not to make a film like these ones we imagined, we weren’t thinking of abbatoir films, slaughterhouse films, we weren’t even thinking of Stan Brakhage or particular styles that we were either mimicking or avoiding in that regard. The references make sense to us after the fact, but none of them are conscious influences at all.

A: How much control did you have over the Go Pro cameras? I know you had them attached to things, but some sequences are really chaotic and seem to suggest the cameras are entirely set free, as when it streams behind the boat with the seagulls…

L: I would say that there are three or three and half different kinds of footage shot with those cameras. One is a series of four shots, spread throughout the film, that were attached to a tripod or to a stable part of the boat, such as the shot from the top of the mast that you get 2/3rds of the way through the film, looking down on the boat. There were only four shots that weren’t either hand held by us or attached to a body. So the first kind was four short shots; the other kind was the shots that were attached to the fishermen’s bodies. Mostly their heads, like miner’s lamps, but also their wrists or their chests. And in that we didn’t have any direct control. Obviously we attached them to their heads because we were interested in what that footage would look like, we had some idea as to what it might look like, but it wasn’t until we started looking at it that we realized how arresting and interesting we thought it was. And then we kept on giving them the cameras to get similar kinds of footage. And then, of the footage that was hand held by us, either we were holding the camera literally with our hands, or we put it on the end of a boom, which is just like a fancy word in our case just for a basic 2X2 - or else two pieces of wood strapped together so we could hold it, up to about sixteen feet away from our arms’ length. And that could either go underwater or above water, within the same shot. And with those shots - I would say there are differences of degree, not kind; we couldn’t look directly through the viewfinder, but it was also true, when we were hand-holding the shots, that these Go Pro cameras didn’t have an LCD screen on the back, so we were just imagining what we were filming. You could say that it’s a further stretch of the imagination when it’s at the end of a stick. But we were also downloading the footage and looking at the footage and realizing what was interesting to us, and so on. Véréna, you put it very well when you said that one films more with one’s body, in some literal sense, than merely with one’s eye.

A: Were you surprised at some of the footage you got? Was there anything you repeated - you looked at and thought it had promise and tried again, having a better idea what it might look like? Second takes?

L: I would say yes and no. We never asked anyone to do anything again - we don’t “direct” the people or script stuff in that way, but because we were looking at it and looking at it, we were constantly surprised about stuff, and bored by stuff, and fascinated by stuff, and anything that intrigued us, but we thought could be rendered more interesting yet, or made more peculiar or unfamiliar yet, we pushed, and we filmed it again.

V: Or we would look at our footage and, being surprised at how arresting the images were when the fishermen were wearing it at night, for instance, we would ask them - “could you pick up the camera when you next go out,” this kind of thing. But to go back to the topic of control, there is a degree of control, when you are directing, even being from your body - even if you don’t look through the viewfinder, you feel what you are doing, and you kind of direct it - if you want the camera being under water at that moment, and then above water the next - you have a kind of control, even if you don’t know exactly what will be on the image.   

A: So for example, the seagull sequence, you were turning the boards so that the camera would go under water, or above…? There’s actually a gestural component to those shots, it’s not just the board spinning free behind the boat?

V: Yeah, it’s controlled by us.

L: You can say that it’s directed in that way, in that we were trying to control it, but we were never able totally to control it. Even if we weren’t on a boat - even if the sea was flat and the boat wasn’t moving, you never can predict what happens precisely in front of the camera, and then with the boat lurching around as it was in high seas like that, even when we were filming on deck, close up to the fish, or close up to the fishermen, we never knew exactly what was going to happen. Often we never knew at all what was going to happen. And that was even more true when, in order to film on the stick with the seagulls, one of us would have to hold on to the other who would then be holding onto the stick, and you couldn’t anticipate when the waves were going to come, or how big they were, and we couldn’t always resist the power of the water slushing by… so we were trying to control it, but the resulting image is a combination of intent and accident.

A: Was there anything too chaotic, stuff that was unwatchable? The film seems to really push the borders, at times, of what the human mind can process as information. Some sequences are really alienating and shocking. Beautiful, but it’s surprising that they make as much sense as they do.

V: Hm. We never had this question…

L: There’s loads of stuff that we rejected, for various reasons, conscious and unconscious. Whether we rejected stuff because it was too chaotic, I’m not sure. In addition to putting a camera on the end of the stick, and attaching it to fishermen’s bodies, we did attach it to a string and have a weight below it, but we didn’t use any of that footage.

A (Laughs): You were fishing with a camera!

V: (Laughs).

L : Fishing with a camera. If we had caught a fish, we might have used it!

A: You attached the camera to a dead fish, did you not?

V: No. It’s not true - it’s one of us holding the camera.

L: That’s an error that’s been said in the press.

V: There are many errors.

L - it’s an old wives’ tale.

A: It’s a great one… If you don’t mind my asking - as someone who has some familiarity with psychedelics, it occurs to me, because the film is so immersive, that it would be an astonishingly good “trip” movie. And some of the filmmaking that Leviathan has been likened to - Brakhage, obviously - comes from a psychedelic perspective. Has anyone commented on that? Would you regard that as a sort of “misuse” of the film - a way of hijacking the purposes of the movie?

V: It’s very funny that you’re asking this question, because this morning I was telling Lucien, “it’s very strange that we always talked about doing this - suddenly being heavily drugged and watching the film, the whole thing.”

L: Even before we finished the film, we wanted to do it to see how it would feel.

V: We wanted to edit under acid, and we never did it, unfortunately. But I’m sure it would be great. We received an email a couple of days ago, a friend of ours say, “I want to tell you, I went to see your film at the IFC in New York under acid, and I want to tell you how it was." Apparently it was great!

A: The sound design seems like it would be a big part of that. But before we get to that, just quickly, what is the heavy metal music used in the film?

L: The shot of the captain -

V: Brian, listening to Mastodon.

L: A song called “I Am Ahab,” from an album called Leviathan.

A: Oh, really? That couldn’t have been an accident.

L: It was a very happy accident. It wasn’t the only kind of music they listened to - they listened to country/western and other kinds of music, too.

A: So did you supervise the sound design (by Ernst Karel and Jacob Ribicoff)? How did that work?

L: I would say “supervise” is a bit too generous; I’m tone-deaf, and Véréna is a bit more musical, but not terribly. Ernst is a collaborator at the Sensory Ethnograpy Lab, we’ve collaborated on lots of different things together. He has the most amazing ear either of us have ever heard. His own aesthetic is very minimalist. He came up with the initial 5.1 surround from all the sounds that we gave him; we were just editing with video software that isn’t that great for audio, and it had more of an unremittingly blaring, punk rock/ heavy metal kind of intensity. He modulated it a lot more and added a lot of really subtle overtones, that were almost inaudible in our mix, and then he gave the mix, once he was done with it, we went to New York and worked with Jacob Ribicoff, who is a cinema sound mixer. Ernst comes more from the art world. The final mix is more cinematic as a result.

A: Did they add anything to the sound - is all the sound we hear stuff that was recorded on the ship?

L: All of it is stuff we recorded, and most of it is in fact synch. Much of it, believe it or not, comes from these little GoPro cameras - a mono-microphone that is really compromised - the sound is super compressed and had lots of digital artifacts that we thought were really interesting. They bizarrely sounded, simultaneously or by turns, super-machinic, super-cyborgian, and then really organic, as if they themselves were gasping for air, as if they themselves were drowning. But we also recorded with a stereo recorder - we recorded, we’re guessing, maybe 50 hours of wild sound, and they laid a lot more of that into amplify and to round out and to specialize and open up the final mix in ways we wouldn’t have been able to do.

A: If I can ask, the one scene that seemed a slightly odd fit was the fisherman taking a shower, because it’s so static and so, well, human. Where did that sequence come from…?

L: Before I answer that, can I ask a question - did you see it at the Vancouver Film Festival?

A: I did.

L: We’ve remixed the sound radically since then. The shower scene is not different, but the four-to-five minute shot of the captain falling asleep in front of the television - he was watching television in the version you saw, but you probably couldn’t hear what he was listening to; he’s actually listening quite literally to The Deadliest Catch, which is this Discovery Channel reality TV show of Alaska king crab fishermen, which totally changes the feel of the scene, and the film as a whole. But how about the shower scene?

V: It’s at least one of the scenes we had long discussions about. There are two things - you use the words “human,” and the word “static,” and the shots with which we have been struggling with a lot are precisely the static shots, and the two human shots. The shower scene - one of the big questions between us when we were editing was how much of the human to use, and how, and when to use it - their weight overall in the film. And suddenly somehow being trapped in the shower with this fisherman sounded like a very intimate moment - a moment where we are really close to him. They have so few moments where they can - first of all, wash; they do that once a week, maybe. So it’s kind of a moment of respite; we don’t have a lot of respite in the film. And the fact that they are cleaning themselves - I don’t know how to answer, but the intimacy at that moment felt, not necessary to us… but good, to us.

L: Our typical struggle was how to introduce humans. We didn’t want to have “character development” or any kind of obvious plot, in the way that one would expect from a fiction film; and we didn’t want the film to be “about” fisherman themselves - we wanted to place the fishermen in this much larger ecological domain, where they were rubbing shoulders with the boat, the machines, with nature, with the elements, and everything, so their centrality would be relativised to an extent. And even to start off in darkness at the beginning, on the back of the boat, and even though much of that is shot from the head of a fisherman, it’s very unfamiliar, it’s very disconcerting, it’s almost uncanny. You don’t have your bearings; it doesn’t feel like a quintessential human-centric film. And gradually humans are introduced, very slowly, to a very limited kind of degree, and the two shots - of the captain in front of the television and the equally static shot of the fisherman taking a shower - are the most intimate moments. To be sure, when he’s taking the shower, it comes after the bow shot of the waves and the underwater sequence during the daytime with the seagulls; so there he is, in the hull, behind the bow, getting wet in order to clean himself. So there’s lots of affinities and differences from the rest of the natural world, that are implicitly being thematized in that shot.

A: Lucien, you’ve said the film resembles a science fiction film or a horror film. How much of that was by design?

L: To be honest, I may have said that, but Véréna has also said the same thing! Each of us repeats what the other has said.

V: (Laughs).

L: So you shouldn’t place too much credence in that! Neither of us were thinking about science fiction films or horror films when we were making it. We just find ourselves obliged to sound more coherent about these sort of genre distinctions after the fact. But we did have some references - they weren’t deliberate, in terms of our intentionality, while we were making the film, but while we were editing the film, we were thinking more painters, more than about other filmmakers. We were thinking about Bosch and Breughel and Escher and Turner - the history of painting began to emerge, and the representation of nature and humanity’s role in relation to nature began to emerge during post-production, during the editing. I don’t know if it influenced us, but it’s something we were aware of. But - we only knew we didn’t want this to be a canonical documentary.

V: What we wanted to do, is just when we were watching the image, is to feel what we were living, the experience we had. And most of this experience was bloody and dark and strange. And even surreal, so I think this is why the reference to sci-fi and horror, because it was also nightmarish.

L: It was simultaneously nightmarish and intimate. It wasn’t an unadulterated nightmare. But to the extent that there are nightmarish qualities, it’s a nightmare that’s lived and breathed by the fisherman, as much as it is by their prey.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's new film, Caniba - about Japanese celebrity cannibal Issei Sagawa - plays the VIFF September 29th and October 10th