A pig farmer tests his unemployed son’s resolve to join the family business.
Not for the faint hearted and animal lovers. But that’s the point. Jason Burton Kohl’s film is a controversial one where we look at a damaged father/son relationship that finally comes to a head during the humane slaughter of a pig. The inspiration came from a personal experience; his father raises pigs. In the fall of 2011 he participated in his first slaughter. It was a transformative experience, one that showed Jason a humane alternative to our industrial slaughterhouses and demonstrated how essential it is to have a relationship with the animals that provide our food.
As a nation, we haven’t stopped eating animals, we just decided to stop watching them die.
As a short filmmaker, I also realized that I had a freedom that most feature filmmakers, with their larger crews and financial responsibilities, didn’t. So I decided to make a bold choice; to try and make this invisible act, one we’re all complicit in, visible.
Read more on how The Slaughter came to with an interview with FilmmakerMagazine.com
Jason’s intentions were to discuss the issues and not the filmmaking. But we can’t help remark the fabulous capture of this intense film and its struggling moments. The film was quiet, yet every little sound made the experience so much more real, with the carefully stretched shots, we really get a sense of how wide the story is, despite a rather simple premise.
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