French director Abel Ferry is presenting his latest work, Gibier, in a world premiere within the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival’s Ultra Movies section. A familiar face at the festival, where he competed for the H.R. Giger Narcisse Award for Best Film in 2009 by way of Vertige [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], which saw scores of cinema-goers breaking out into cold sweats, Abel Ferry has hit the bullseye once again, winning over a hard-to-please, thrill-seeking audience. Although the film’s title - translating as “game” in English - might bring to mind a menu from a restaurant which no self-respecting vegan would ever frequent, the values it defends are far from shared by the hunters who stalk the mountains in search of their prey.

The protagonists of this story are a group of activists (the eldest being played by Anne Richard) who live in a community in the middle of the countryside. Disillusioned by the frenzy, violence and indifference of the society in which they lived and worked until very recently, our animal rights champions have decided to withdraw from the world to live in a community-style utopia. What provokes their anger and gets the film going is the sense of injustice they feel when they learn about the atrocious living conditions of the pigs arriving at the local slaughterhouse. Wanting to expose what’s going on, they decide to film what they’re seeing with a view to either posting the footage online or handing it over to the press. It’s a seemingly low-risk act but it proves far more complicated that our heroes and heroines expected. And the abattoir owner (convincingly played by Olivier Gourmet) - an aspiring politician who’ll do anything to protect his precious steak factory - complicates things even further.

With its crazy races, multitudes of weapons and litres of haemoglobin, Gibier depicts the fight between good and evil, between ideology and profit, and between tenderness and violence, with credibility (and occasional comedy). But even though the four protagonists (played by Kim Higelin, Marie Kremer, Mouloud Ayad and Jean-Baptiste Lafarge) are driven by wholly laudable motivations, the violence they adopt sometimes makes us wonder where the limits of their punitive action lie. How far should you go to defend your ideals? It all seems legitimate at the beginning of the film, which opens with a series of unbearable images of abuse being inflicted on a drove of pigs (and piglets) in an abattoir, but the more the story advances, the blurrier the line between good and evil becomes.

Exquisitely bloody but never gratuitously shocking, compelling and never boring, the film follows characters who wouldn’t look out of place in a classic US genre film. The precision with which each of them is depicted prevents the story from ever being predictable or excessively caricatural. Ultimately, Gibier confirms Abel Ferry’s talent for portraying horror and violence without sliding into pure spectacularisation, and the humour and ambiguity pervading the film allow viewers to experience the guilty pleasure every genre film lover inevitably feels.

Gibier was produced by Phase 4 Productions, Place du Marché Productions (France) and Umedia (Belgium), with WTFilms handling international sales.