| Summary: | Manuela Frésil, a filmmaker and trained philosopher, has created here a vehicle for studying slaughterhouse workers’ attitude to death. She uses her camera to follow meat cutting and packaging operations and reveal employees’ working conditions. By filming different sites, she reconstructs generic (or in her words, universal) situations attesting to the physical strenuousness of this kind of work – while offering workers an unprecedented opportunity to speak their minds.Two sociologists discuss with the director the filming choices she has made in trying to overcome obstacles that make it so difficult to show workers in a real slaughterhouse environment. The focus is on what this means for them - namely that they will be so worn down physically that they will have to finish their careers well before the official retirement age. Not to forget more recent recruits’ fear of losing their jobs due to the ever-increasing productivity demands resulting in certain companies leaving France for Eastern Europe.
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