Animal Law & Policy Program Executive Director Chris Green will moderate a panel he put together with the directors of the recent documentary films My Octopus Teacher, STRAY, and GUNDA (Pippa Ehrlich, Elizabeth Lo, and Victor Kossakovsky).
Event Overview
A New Breed of Animal Documentary” brings together the directors of three groundbreaking animal documentaries from the past year: Gunda, Stray, and My Octopus Teacher (2021 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature). Each of these films represents a new narrative and cinematic approach that focuses primarily the animals themselves, from their own, eye-level perspective. There also is a progression from My Octopus Teacher being a narrated tale of an animal’s interaction with a human, to STRAY including humans and their voices only as supporting characters in the animals’ story, and GUNDA not including any humans or dialogue at all. While the three films all center on different categories of animals (aquatic, companion, and farmed), they each similarly underscore the agency, cognition, and emotional capacity of their individual animal protagonists.
Here is the full Canadian Animal Law Conference 2021 schedule.