This brutal,illuminating change of direction from the Austrian dramatist of the grotesque is a semi-staged documentary provoking legitimate revulsionOnce you become accustomed to the icily grotesque world summoned up by the Austrian film-maker Ulrich Seidl, it is rare to feel anything other than a kind of jaded, or subdued horror. But I felt something real in the course of this documentary approximately Austrian titanic-game tourists at a Namibian hunting lodge: unselfconscious rage and disgust. The sheer smugness and chilling lack of imagination of these people playing the remarkable White Hunter is intellect boggling as they slay Impala and zebras with deafeningly loud and powerful hunting rifles - in controlled conditions which effectively disguise the fish-in-a-barrel nature of the experience they’re buying.
But as a meat eater,I also had to recognise that the implications of what Seidl is showing us are not so far from a lot of people’s lives, far from this obviously exotic arena. However: the hunters’ conceited theatrical rituals, or the acquire-up and the vocab are especially infuriating.
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Source: theguardian.com