SANGRE DE MI SANGRE

With astonishing narrative flow, Jérémie Reichenbach films alternately the work and home life of an Argentine family whose two sons work in a slaughterhouse. Gradually, what first appeared to border on fantasy or horror (a car arriving in darkness, the sound of knives being sharpened in the locker room, the steam rising from the butchered carcasses) begins to circulate with gestures that exude pure life – the laundry hung out by Tato, the guitar melody he plays in church. Yet, the brutality of slaughter and even the working conditions is not eluded; it forms part of lives that constantly resist being reduced to this. At a strategic moment in the film, an unassuming signboard, “BOSSLESS SLAUGHTERHOUSE”, hints at a possible explanation for the feeling of satisfying continuity between this very special profession and life at home. Self-management is not portrayed as utopian (as the heated disputes in the offices go to show), and almost seems to be a facet of family sociability. Conversely, a casual conversation at a barbecue takes a political turn when it broaches the loss of the indigenous culture and language. There is a strange gentleness in this false Blood of the Beasts, which, against a background of an ode sung to the mother or of bawdy couplets, unobtrusively explores the warmth of blood ties.

Charlotte Garson