The Lie of the Land

The Lie of the Land begins with penetrating images of Ian Williams as he wrestles with a frightened calf and then kills it with a practiced shot. “What was wrong with that one?” asks filmmaker Molly Dineen. “Nothing, there’s no value for him,” replies Williams in a soft voice. The male calf is not worth anything on the specialized dairy farm, and the three pounds Williams would get for taking it to the slaughterhouse would not even cover the gas to get there, so Williams feeds the animals to his dogs and sells their hides. Dineen follows him and his colleague Paul Hancock in Cornwall in their daily lives as animal slayer and hunter, struggling to make ends meet in a changing agrarian society that is suffering at the hands of the supermarkets. While on the one hand commerce hurts animal welfare, animal rights activists also cause their share of problems. Curtailing the traditional hunt means loss of income for the hunters, but also for the farmers that breed pheasants for the hunt, such as Glyn Pearman in Cottswolds. With a sharp eye for detail and in an unbiased manner, Dineen provides insight into the mechanisms of the food industry and their consequences for English farmers. —idfa