Documentary
British indie director Andrea Arnold makes a sharp turn from her acclaimed dramatic filmmaking (Red Road, Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights, American Honey) into documentary with the straightforwardly named Cow, which depicts the life of dairy cow Luma.
It’s a life wholly constructed to serve human beings. Conceived by design, the serene, sombre Luma is born on to a dairy farm where she is kept permanently pregnant in order to maximise her production of milk. Enduring monotonous agribusiness days, milked by massive, clanking machinery, her life is shown to be one undignified cycle of pumping, impregnation, gestation and birth, and entirely not her own. Staying close to Luma, cinematographer Magdalena Kowalczyk’s camera invites us to see the world as a cow – or at the very least, to consider the deeper mystery of that proposition.
Filmed over several years – as Luma grows from calf to cow, mates with bulls and roams with her herd – Cow is shot through with passion and conviction. Clearly a long-term project for Arnold, who apparently wanted to make a film about an animal for a long time before settling on a dairy cow, its release now feels like part of a wider societal reassessment, as we learn more about the biodiversity and climate crises, our overuse of natural resources, and the fact that we cannot continue to live as we have. In this experiential doc, the way we use and brutalise animals as a matter of course, the way we routinely exploit and discard them, feels newly up for review.
“A stirring, often sad contemplation of a life reduced to resources” Indiewire