STILL LIFE New Auteurs

In her first feature film, director Maud Alpi paints an excruciatingly intimate and beautifully disturbing portrait of a young nameless worker who earns a temporary living by ushering countless livestock to a gruesome and untimely death for the sole purpose of human consumption. While this job is clearly a means to justify a financial end, as time goes on he becomes increasingly conflicted by his moral objection to the inhumane method of slaughter and the depths to which he has sunk to earn a paycheck — an inner conflict that is elevated by the tender connection between his faithful dog Bobo and the four-legged creatures on the chopping block. With gorgeously crafted and brutally organic imagery, STILL LIFE serves as a visual testament to quality over quantity. — Yvonne Williams