Catalan Pau Faus’ Fauna is a film chockful of contrasts, but also one that is invested with bucketloads of humanity. At its core is the dichotomous co-existence of a hi-tech (and literally sterile) animal testing centre within verdant farm and woodland on which livestock graze, and where a shepherd maintains his large flock.
When the film was made, the lab personnel were working on developing an antidote to the Covid-19 virus, which entailed testing on a range of animals from adult pigs, their tiny piglet offspring, chickens, goats, sheep and rats. The staff, comprising scientists, technicians, cleaning staff and waste disposal operatives, are kitted out like NASA astronauts and the place is run to highly exacting standards of cleanliness.
But outside, nature thrives in all its splendour, and at the heart of it is the aging shepherd Valeriano. His is a profession that the youth of Catalonia have turned their collective back on, we are told, with 90% of shepherds now in their 70’s. Why don’t they retire? “Because they’re sick and obsessed, and it’s the only thing they know,” he observes.
Years of shepherding have taken their toll on Valeriano’s bones, and he must face up to the reality that very soon he may have to hang up his crook. We observe the shepherd’s loving and gentle relationship with his wife, who years before was a city girl, but who is also suffering from a degenerative disorder. In one touching scene she massages her husband’s weary hands as they recall their courtship years before.
But such is Valeriano’s condition, he too must engage with hi-tech procedures both in diagnosis and treatment. And then there is a question of what to do with his flock…
“I was so happy when I discovered this forest through the window of the laboratory,” Faus observes to BDE of the contrasting view of nature he saw from the sterile lab. “But a window is not a story, it is not a film.” So he had to “dig” to find the red line of his documentary. “I told myself, if I find a story outside in these woods, this is going to be the film…and then I found the shepherd.”
The contrast he encountered in the outside world was hypnotic. “To be walking around with this shepherd and to adapt to the rhythm of this kind of work,” Faus muses. “They [shepherds] just walk and they stay in a field for two or three hours, and then they walk a little bit more.”
Faus’ initial plan had been to make a Covid-related film, but not one set in hospitals or concerning emergency frontline response, as so many other films did so memorably during the pandemic. Rather he wanted to focus on the search for the vaccine, and in particular the use of animal testing during this endeavour.
But the film was never going to be an information-laden overview of the subject, nor indeed a polemic about the ethics of animal testing. Rather, in telling the parallel story of Valeriano, it became what Faus calls a work of “science-fiction poetry,” where the worlds of science and nature meet and intertwine. (Faus actually imagined the testing centre as a spaceship that fell to earth). And just as an insect bug mysteriously enters the sterile inner sanctum of the lab (setting in motion a flurry of corrective activity), so does the world of science enter the life and work of shepherd Valeriano, both from a health perspective and the choices he must consider over the future of his flock.
“I wanted to put more life into the laboratory…I didn’t want to show them as robot scientists. I wanted to show that this was a common place where common people work. Some of them are cleaners, some of them are scientists,” Faus observes. On the other hand, the film eschews the “classical, nostalgic” depiction of the shepherd. “I wanted to [show] the shepherd with a kind of a contradictory sense.”
There are numerous documentaries about animal testing in which the key protagonists are protesters or anti-vivisectionists. Not so this film, although Faus acknowledges the “dark place” that such laboratories inhabit when it comes to testing on consumer products.
“Once you have a story in front of, you have to decide what point of view you choose. It’s not something that comes with the story. It’s always a decision,” the director concedes. “Let’s talk about the contradiction, because usually with animal testing we all know where we have to answer. If we think about cosmetics or cleaning products, of course, we don’t want animals to be tested with that. But what about chemotherapy that is saving your mother, or about new medicine…for asthma or for diabetes? So this is really contradictory, at least for me.” He adds that the lab staff have a strong belief in their work and ask, “why do we have to hide?”
Faus further underlines in his film notes his lyrical and nuanced approach to describing these complex aspects of modern life. “I needed to deepen into the contrast between technology and rusticity, between a group of scientists and an old shepherd, between animals grazing in the open air and animals turned into guinea pigs inside a science lab,” he says. “It was clear to me that these apparently antagonistic realities were more connected than expected. After all, I have always believed that this film talks about a window that divides one same world into two. The problem is that the unstoppable growth of one side carries the unavoidable disappearance of the other.”
