Anonymous Animals

“Anonymous Animals” by director Baptiste Rouveure combines the everyday horror that takes place around the human use of animals with a disturbing premise: What if the roles were reversed? Since its premiere, the film has enjoyed an enormously successful festival career at the most prestigious international genre film festivals and has won numerous awards.

Synopsis

The balance of power between humans and animals is reversed, positions are switched. In a remote field or elsewhere, any encounter with the dominant species can be life-threatening. At the intersection of fantasy and horror, “Anonymous Animals” questions the place of animals in our society.

Director Baptiste Rouveure about the genesis

“The movie has its origin in an obsessive image: that of a horse attacking a man under carnivorous impulses. This unconscious nightmare image has come to nourish other real ones I had in my head from a rural childhood. Because of my proximity to a natural environment, I have been a privileged observer of a wild nature, but also a witness to the fateful hold of man on animals through exploitation and hunting. Over time, these sometimes bloody, macabre, cruel pictures have come to nourish a strong empathy towards the animal and a constant questioning of its place in our society.

This carnivorous horse that haunted me was the result of a dysfunction, a sick and dying nature. During the writing of the film, this digression of the food chain was then transformed into a transposition of the bodies between man and animal. The resulting anthropomorphic animals act according to our codes as dominant exploiters and hunters, carrying within them a dehumanization towards the… human species. This switching of roles thus places the human protagonists under the yoke of animal domination, for which there are nameless silhouettes of anonymous animals, involved in different kinds of exploitation where each is interchangeable with the other.”

The absence of dialogue

This debut feature film follows in the footsteps of a series of short films without words (“And The Winner Is”, “Les Éphémères Fugitifs”, “Altera”) which already focused on body language: the gesture taking precedence over words, movement over dialogue. For “Anonymous Animals”, the first sketches of dialogues quickly appeared superfluous and futile. Placed in an environment they do not master, the senses of the protagonists are constantly alert and the slightest movement expresses an intention. The purification of the dialogues has thus rehabilitated silence, silence has given way to something organic and universal. This sensory approach was in line with the idea of the communication barrier between man and animal: By inverting everyone’s places, I wanted to keep this inability to decipher the language of these anonymous animals in order to preserve only a purely physical exchange.

About director Baptiste Rouveure

In addition to commissioned films, Baptiste Rouveure continues his work in fiction, where the focus on movement and body language remain his preferred approach. His 2012’s short film “And The Winner Is” depicts a boxer fighting his double. Among the international festival selections, the film received the “Best short film award” at the 35th Rassegna Cinematographica Internazionale Festival in Italy. In 2018 “Altera” invites 13 dancers into a dystopic world to talk about the rejection of the other and the resulting withdrawal into oneself. The film stands out with 29 selections in official competitions in more than 19 countries. It won twice the prize for “Best dance film” (Imajitari International Dance Film, Indonesia, and Moving Body Festival, Bulgaria), the prize for “Best editing” (Muestra Movimiento Audiovisual, Mexico), the 3rd prize at Shortwave Festival in Poland and the prize of the “best photography” at the Festival de Cinearte en la Frontera. “Anonymous Animals” is Baptiste Rouveure‘s first feature film.

Filmography