Récits des vivants / More-than-human narratives : film director Maud Alpi in conversation with Armelle Blin-Rolland
”The animals arrive by night. They intuit. They resist. A young man leads them to their deaths before dawn. His dog discovers a terrifying world that seems certain never to end.”
This seminar is part of the series ‘Récits des vivants / More-than-human narratives’, in which artists and activists in contemporary France discuss the ways in which their work engages with environmental and animal questions, and reflect on how narrative may be deployed to question anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, towards environmental justice and meaningful sustainability. Maud Alpi is the award-winning director of the short films Le fils de la sorcière (2004), Nice (2009), Drakkar (2015), and the feature-length film Gorge Cœur Ventre/Still Life (2016), which was shot in a working slaughterhouse and on which this seminar will focus. During this seminar Maud Api will talk about the context in which she made the film, how her initial script and ideas evolved in contact with the non-human animals that are at the core of the film, and the aesthetic, ethical and political issues it raises for creating and articulating more-than-human narratives.