ANIMALS

With “ANIMALS.” I wanted to explore my discomfort with the phrase “Life goes on.” On the surface it's a menial phrase that doesn’t seem significant, but it creates an impression in the human psyche that is hard to shake. Animals explores the consequences of this phrase and addresses who benefits from it and who doesn't. People die and the world keeps spinning, but what happens to the people who are disenfranchised throughout their entire lives? Some people are born into poverty and die in poverty, never knowing the taste of true stability. Some trans people die never having ever felt the acceptance of their family and friends. Yet the world goes on. A black man is gunned down in the streets by a police officer. The world mourns, but it eventually resumes spinning. When the world keeps spinning, then people that have lost their lives to tragic
circumstances get lost in motion. I made ANIMALS., to recapture this feeling.

I wanted the world to see what it looks like from a bird’s eye view how desensitized to tragedy we have become. I wanted people to see the humanity in Zoya, but I also wanted to see themselves in Amelia’s friends, the guests who avoid the difficult conversation and allow her to escape accountability. The film is not meant to point fingers but to give people a chance to reflect on the ways in which they ignore the ugly of the world
and what that leads to. When the world keeps spinning and we continue on as if the world we live in is inherently unjust and some tragedies are normal or even necessary, we lose parts of ourselves that make us human. The coyote pays no mind to the hollowed out carcass of a dead bird, because coyotes are animals. Animals do not concern themselves with empathy or holding space for tragedy. Animals do not perceive death as a tragedy because in the context of living in the wild death can become a reward. Humans live in civilized society where food, for most part, isn’t scarce so we have the time to revel in grief and hold space for being angry at injustices. Why don’t we?

This film is largely inspired by all forms of colonization. I remember reading about the genocide of Native Americans in middle school and feeling largely unsatisfied with the conclusion of the chapter. That’s it? I thought. In my naivety, I also thought there might have been a sense of reprieve or justice that would come afterwards, but there was nothing. Just pain and suffering left for only the Natives to be burdened with. The Holocaust. The Armenian Genocide. The Rwandan Genocide. Wikipedia has a list of genocides that would take a day to scroll through. It’s easy for us to keep living through these tragedies, because they are reframed as things of the past. Death is categorized as a natural part of the human existence, regardless of how it happens. Tragedies like these are undercurrents of the human experience, but they are not natural. Maybe the world should stop spinning for them, for even a second.

From birth we have been conditioned to accept suffering as a part of human existence. While it is true that suffering is a natural part of life, I wanted to differentiate the different kinds of suffering with this film. Zoya grieving the loss of her mother is the natural suffering that Buddha spoke about, but her losing access to her autonomy and being reduced to an animal was manufactured suffering and those two are vastly different from
one another.

The title of “ANIMALS.” is open to who it might apply to. When some people watch the film they might see Amelia reducing Zoya to a dog and assume that the treatment of Zoya is what makes her the animal. Others will view Amelia’s aggression and callousness as animalistic and therefore she is the animal. I was intentional in naming the film “ANIMALS.” and not “ANIMAL.” It’s plural because it is multilateral. Amelia makes Zoya into an animal literally, but she turns herself into one mentally. The ways in which you dehumanize people, you are also dehumanizing yourself. When we don’t stop to acknowledge tragedies for what they are, we relinquish control and resign to our basic instincts.

That’s when we become ANIMALS.