In a documentary that “does not judge but rather exposes,” director Pau Faus (Mayor) invites the public to reflect on the relationship between humans and science, nature, and animal experimentation. “It is very easy to be against animal experimentation to make cosmetics, but when you realize that many of the medications that save our lives have been tested before on animals, the contradiction that is generated is very great,” says the director. in dialogue with La Vanguardia. In his new feature film, the filmmaker places the audience in the spring of 2020, during one of the most critical moments of the coronavirus pandemic. While a rural shepherd lives in apparent harmony with nature, a few meters away, scientists work in a laboratory to develop vaccines that will save millions of people. There, the animals that enter do not leave alive.
The story contrasts the life of a shepherd, the archetype in the collective unconscious of humans in harmony with nature, with the work of pharmacists within an animal experimentation laboratory. “The public can almost imagine: the good guys and the bad guys, but the film shows that on a day-to-day basis the laboratory is still a very human place.”
The idea for the film arose from a commission that the production company Nanouk films gave to Faus during confinement to portray what was happening in a more slow and reflective way. The director was surprised to observe that animal experimentation played a fundamental role in the development of antidotes to save human lives. “In the pandemic we were all experts in vaccines,” recalls the director. The media coverage of the issue was enormous, “but they never told us that the vaccines, before being passed on to humans, had been in animals.”
The Animal Health Research Center laboratory was, according to Faus, a place that condensed very well what was happening in the world during 2020. “People locked up, under very powerful security measures, with the virus in their hands trying to decipher what was happening.” The film shows the extreme sanitary measures required to enter the high-tech center while, a few kilometers away, the shepherd performs twelve thousand years old work in the middle of nature. “It’s like a trip in the time “.
The use of animals in pharmaceutical experimentation has been reduced by almost half in the last 10 years, according to data published by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in 2020, but even today it remains a fundamental pillar of modern medicine. “On the one hand it is a very difficult thing to accept, almost aberrant, but on the other hand, would we be willing to give up scientific advances in exchange for not sacrificing animals?”, says the director. The film does not try to answer the question, only to put this question on the table. “I believe that the truth has only one side. That of a violent contradiction”, with this quote from Georges Bataille, Pau Faus opens the debate in Fauna.
