Project Detail

Becoming Animal

Synopsis

Examining the relationship between ourselves and the other species we share the planet with has opened up new ways to understand our place in the world. This film offers an attempt to give some of these new ways of thinking a cinematic form.
An essay based on a field trip to Wyoming's wild nature, in the company of the bio-philosopher David Abram and the two visionary filmmakers Emma Davie and Peter Mettler. And with an abundance of bison, moose and birds. Both form and thought are unchained in a film that ends up moving (far) beyond man's self-centred view of nature, and into a state of almost psychedelic receptiveness. As Mettler asks in a diaristic note: Are language and modern technology a barrier or an open door between ourselves and the world that surrounds us? And what about the medium of film itself?
Official Selection CPH:DOX 2018 - World premiere

Details

Year
2018
Type of project
Features
Running time
78 mins
Director
Emma Davie, Peter Mettler
Producer
Cornelia Seitler, Rebecca Day, Sonja Henrici, Brigitte Hofer
Editor
Peter Mettler
Director of Photography
Peter Mettler

Categories

Production Status

Production Company

Switzerland, UK co-production

maximage Filmproduktion (CH), SDI Productions (UK)

SDI Productions

SDI (Scottish Documentary Institute)
Sonja Henrici
ECA
74 Lauriston Place
Edinburgh
EH3 9DF

Sales Company

Scottish Documentary Institute

Eve Korzec
ECA
74 Lauriston Place
Edinburgh
EH3 9DF

Page updates

This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

See also

You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.

Image of a vicar holding up the eucharist. Matter of Britain

Director: Peter Treherne

Year: 2026

MATTER OF BRITAIN was an English country village’s performance of the Holy Grail myth. In that myth, King Arthur’s knights quest for the Holy Grail in order to heal their wasted land. The performance took place over 12 months from 2023 to 2024 in multiple locations across the parish of Mayfield, East Sussex. Over 300 members of the community took part as questing knights, angelic choirs, guiding anchorites and tempting devils. The performance was documented and subsequently made into an ethnographic fantasy that has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, CPH:DOX, Cinéma du Réel and Open City Documentary Film Festival. The work was supported by an Arts Council England Project Grant, the Lund Trust, High Weald AONB, East Sussex Arts Partnership, the University of Reading and the Museum of English Rural Life.

Louise is in  the bath, we can see Meg filming her in the reflection in the mirror. They are talking Mother's Influence

Director: Meg Wriggles

Year: 2025

Growing up with an unconventional single mother – an influencer navigating aging and body dysmorphia, Meg admires her but questions how it shaped her own self-image. Through laughter and vulnerability, they unpack identity, influence, and the complexities of their evolving relationship. Official Selection Edinburgh International Film Festival 2026 – World Premiere

Lilyana and her Grandfather I Want To Kill My Grandfather

Director: Lilyana Torres, Carlos Morales

Year: 2027

When filmmaker Lilyana Torres learns that her grandfather hired hitmen to nearly kill her father, she sets out to confront him in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and force an apology. The attack left her father with cracked ribs, a broken nose, and loose teeth. Its architect was his own father. Like much of Lilyana’s family history, nobody spoke of it again. So she begins planning his murder. In darkly comic fictional reenactments, Lilyana trains for revenge with the help of a retired detective. Some methods are efficient, others grotesque, all adapted to an ageing man. Against these fantasies, family home videos reveal a more unsettling contradiction: birthday parties, tenderness, and a grandfather who once appeared devoted to his son and granddaughter. How could a parent put their own child’s life at risk? Before Lilyana reaches him, her grandfather dies peacefully in bed, taking every explanation with him. Determined to complete the film, she casts an actor named Perfecto to play him and kills him on screen, again and again. But the performance exposes the question she cannot escape: what does revenge actually resolve? Lilyana confronts the possibility that the violence she wants to destroy may already live inside her.