A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: What the success of Food for profit tells us - Andrea Turco (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Luckily there are phenomena that are still able to surprise us. One of 
these is the enormous success of Food for profit. For those who missed 
it or who have lived on Mars in recent months, Food for profit is a 
docufilm - it is the most relevant definition because it has the ethics 
of a documentary and the aesthetics of a film - which is focused on 
denouncing the system of intensive animal farming and the double thread 
that links intensive farming, never declared as such by the European 
Union, to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), i.e. the major source of 
financing granted by the EU. The documentary film is a journey to 
several European states that reveals what lies behind the apparent 
innocence of our food consumption: a reality made of exploitation of 
animals and people and land, widespread pollution, damage to 
biodiversity, use of antibiotics and GMO.

In mid-April, Food for Profit was still in the top ten of the most 
watched films at the cinema, more than two months after its launch, and 
has grossed (so far) around 500 thousand euros. And to this must be 
added the dozens and dozens of free screenings, where there were always 
full houses. Raise your hand if you would have predicted only a quarter 
of these numbers at the end of February, when the docufilm was launched 
through an effective communication campaign. Let's say it clearly: if 
there is still too little attention to the environment in Italy and 
animal rights are mistreated every day, anti-speciesism is a topic 
opposed even by comrades. Imagining that such a documentary film could 
achieve such attention would have been an exercise in science fiction. 
This alone should make us reflect. Because Food for profit confronts us 
with our impotence. Faced with the theses of those who maintain that 
people are tired, increasingly inactive and selfish and numbed by social 
media, it will now be possible to oppose the mass phenomenon of a 
documentary film that manages to extract itself from the niche precisely 
because it chooses to tell in a powerful and direct way what concerns 
us, all of us, managing to intercept our daily life made up of lazy 
purchases of butchered meat at the supermarket. It does so by lashing 
out clearly against the European institutions, undermining the thesis of 
a certain progressive left for which "only Europe can save us". The 
documentary film, which at certain moments recalls the best Michael 
Moore (do you remember him?), then makes three requests which reveal its 
character of "civil commitment": the establishment of citizen assemblies 
to choose where to channel public money; a moratorium to stop the 
construction of new intensive farms; the stop to public subsidies for 
intensive farming.

Food for profit was written, filmed and "interpreted" by the journalist 
Giulia Innocenzi. Known for having worked on a couple of Michele 
Santoro's TV programmes, she then moved on to Le Iene and Report, 
maintaining and refining a journalistic style made up of aggressive 
tenacity, a camera focused more on her own face than on that of the 
people interviewed, attentive reporting also to style as well as 
content. In Food for profit Innocenzi elevates the characteristics that 
have made it famous to the nth degree. First of all, it focuses on the 
accessibility of the topic, giving a 5-year journalistic investigation a 
cinematic feel that alternates subjective shots and contextual 
interviews with clear infographics, explanatory drawings and grainy 
films that testify, through the help of hidden cameras, the terrible 
suffering imposed on animals. The docufilm maintains rhythm and tension 
even when it supports the narcissism of Innocenzi herself: always in the 
foreground, with the vigilante attitude of someone who solves things 
alone and is the only one to oppose the plans of power. Although the 
documentary film is supported by LAV, the historic animal rights 
association, and although its communication is entrusted to a young 
person from the Last Generation, no space is left for them in the 
documentary, with Innocenzi limiting himself to having these entities 
participate in the screenings collective (not even all of them), as if 
to illuminate them with reflected light, his own, incapable of stepping 
aside. In a critical piece with the ambitious title "In Food for Profit 
there are all the wrong ways of doing environmentalism today", the 
journalist Ferdinando Cotugno defines it as "a populist manifesto". 
Reinforcing the idea that in this little Italy worn out by controversies 
that tomorrow we will forget what matters is positioning. Here, however, 
we are interested in the result. Food for profit is a tool that can 
allow us to make ourselves known to those who would never speak to us, 
to broaden the anti-capitalist reasoning that can be barely understood 
in the documentary film, to savor the requests of those who have perhaps 
become depoliticised, or have never been political, by providing us the 
missing connections. Nothing else matters. It doesn't matter that Giulia 
Innocenzi is basically a daddy's girl who studied at Luiss, because even 
from the bourgeois something good can come out. It doesn't matter that 
his journalism is a thesis and that indeed, in some places, it is not 
even technically journalism but rather a staging, as when he subjects 
some MEPs to phantom experiments involving six-legged pigs and which 
however serves to aim the finger on the real genetic selection of 
animals, making us wonder what might happen if such extreme points were 
reached in the future. It doesn't matter that you put big industry, 
owners and workers together in the same cauldron (to whom you however 
dedicate in my opinion the most successful part of the 
docu-film),failing to distinguish the different responsibilities. His 
weaknesses should not be distracting. Food for profit should be 
considered as a starting point, an entertainment tool on which to model 
paths of activism and militancy. He has plowed the ground, now it's our 
turn to sow.

Andrea Turco

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en