The Ghosts in Our Machine, a film by director Liz Marshall, premiered last week in Toronto at the Hot Docs documentary film festival. The film follows Jo-Anne McArthur, a talented photographer who has dedicated her life to documenting and exposing the suffering and torment central to the lives of those non-human animals with the misfortune of becoming a part of our human “machine”. The film opens in a dark, dank fur farm where animals are caged in wire enclosures with not so much as a mat or sheet to stand on. Their feet balanced on a painful looking wire mesh, the animals display typical anxiety-based behaviours- spinning, obsessive digging, fighting and other repetitive motions, all in order to release some of the stress and frustration of their predicament. One fox sits in a corner, frozen with fear. Their ear has been ripped off and is severely infected. He or she is only one of the billions suffering at the hands of the fur industry. McArthur has admitted that she suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome due to her exposure to such intense and heart wrenching animal cruelty. “The hardest part is leaving,” she says, “leaving is the reason that I’m haunted."

In the week before seeing the film, I was a bit anxious about what I was getting myself into. Though I knew that I would regret not seeing it, and the animal activist in me won in the end, I still felt nervous. As someone who is already aware of what’s going on and who is empathetic to the animals we eat, wear and otherwise use, I always wonder if the visualization of this reality is helpful or harmful for me. I was nervous that the film would play off the traditional blood and gore ethos of the animal rights movement, but this was not necessarily the case. The only part that was hard to watch in this regard was the footage of cows in the slaughter line, being stunned before succumbing to their demise with a cut of the throat. Otherwise, the most difficult part for me was the footage of the fur farms and slaughter houses. It was not gory, but rather a straight, up front documentation of the conditions that these animals were in. Outside of the slaughter houses and fur farms, we see happier situations as well. A family is shown rescuing their second laboratory tested Beagle, and a good chunk of the film is shot at the Farm Sanctuary in New York, where the protagonist says she recuperates, surrounded by happy animals.

I attended the film with a friend who eats meat, and although there will be no dramatic change in his diet, I believe the film opened his eyes at least to the reality of it all. I hope he is not the only one.

During the Q&A period at the end, I had one question for McArthur and Marshall: "In situations where you have spoken with people who work in slaughter houses, fur farms or other places which exploit animals, did you feel that they didn’t care about the animals at all, or more so that they had to separate themselves in order to do their job?”

Although my highest area of interest pertaining to this question couldn’t be addressed (their investigations of the worst of the worst- fur farms and slaughterhouses-were undercover and therefore they didn’t have contact with the workers), they did say that for the most part the workers that they met did like the animals. Of course, this was mostly involving zoos and marine parks, where McArthur commented that there were disagreements about whether the animals should be kept in captivity. She also added on that some workers don’t even want to work in slaughterhouses, which, she laughs, is a whole other human rights issue. I have to assume this is in less developed countries, but of course I could be wrong.

Overall, I have to publicly commend these two women and everyone involved in the making of this documentary for being brave enough to enter situations where I believe most, especially those who are exceptionally empathetic towards animals, would be too overwhelmed to ever consider seeing. I’m glad that I saw The Ghosts in Our Machine, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is open to conversation about the central question of the film: “Are animals property to be used or are they sentient beings deserving of rights?"