Animals

An animal film? Real animals are hardly to be seen. Instead, people approach being an animal in meditations, with robots and furry costumes. What kind of being is the human being who thinks so much about animals? A bird call imitation seminar, an animal telepathy hotline, a beauty contest for pedigree dogs. Wherever the film looks: Animals are processed, sorted, studied, and yet they remain enigmatic and absent. What is inside the animal? The deeper the digging, the less certainty remains. And while the animals increasingly disappoint, a melancholy perplexity creeps in. One had hoped to find an answer in the animal and became quite a stranger to oneself. Encounters in animal costumes offer a last hope for warmth and dissociation. A film like a shimmering mirror surface in which we recognize ourselves, painfully familiar.