Director Baptiste Rouveure‘s experimental feature film is set in a world where power positions are reversed – positions are swapped between humans and animals. 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.
“Anonymous Animals” 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 had an enormously successful festival career at the most prestigious international genre film festivals and has received numerous awards.
The film with the actors Thierry Marcos, Aurélien Chilarsky, Pauline Guilpain and Emilien Lavaut has already been screened at the following festivals, among others: Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic 2020, Grimmfest 2020, Screamfest 2020, Anatolia International Filmfestival (Winner) and Santiago Horror Festival.
At the intersection of fantasy and horror, “Anonymous Animals” questions the place of animals in our society. A film that has a long-lasting effect.
Baptiste Rouveure said of the film: “Anonymous Animals 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.”
Press reviews & comments
“A clever and disturbing horror film”. (Ready Steady Cut)
“Artful, different, beautiful and fantastic.” (Horror Scream Video Vault)
“Novel, refreshing horror.” (Terror Weekend)
“The human beast [is] relentlessly held up a mirror. […] This makes Anonymous Animals a sad but also harrowing cinematic experience that will linger on. […] A wake-up call and a punch in the gut at the same time.” (Filmchecker.wordpress.com)
Technical datas
Picture format Blu-Ray: 2.35:1 in 16:9 | Running time film on DVD: approx. 62 min (DVD); Running time film on Blu-Ray: approx. 64 min | Sound format: Without dialogue | Extras: Trailer show | Rating Blu-Ray & DVD: FSK 18 (because of trailers); Rating Movie: FSK 16
More information about the movie: Anonymous Animals
