PIGS
2010 · 7:48 minutes · SD video, 24p
Directed, filmed, and edited by Paweł Wojtasik
Consultant: Natasha Schüll
Filmed at RC Farms in Las Vegas, Nevada, PIGS brings sustained attention to the physical presence and lived reality of pigs. Through scenes of rest, birth, feeding, movement, and direct encounter, the film allows the animals to appear in their raw factuality—as powerful, vulnerable, social, and perceptive beings.
The camera does not explain or interpret them. It remains close to their bodies, gestures, appetites, and gaze, creating an intimacy in which the distinction between human observer and animal subject becomes less secure.
About the Film
PIGS was filmed at RC Farms on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Farmer Robert Combs allowed the pigs to roam through the fields and raised them for sale rather than slaughtering them himself. He collected discarded food from the city’s casino buffets and brought it back to the farm to feed the animals. In this way, the excess of Las Vegas entered directly into the daily life of the pigs.
The film is concerned above all with presence: the presence of the animals before the camera, the presence of the filmmaker among them, and the awareness that arises through sustained looking. It moves between quiet and intensity. Pigs rest in water, gather around food, move through the fields, and attend to one another. A sow lies beside her newborn piglets. In the central sequence, the arrival of a truck carrying outdated milk produces a sudden feeding frenzy, transforming the measured rhythm of observation into an eruption of collective appetite and force.
At another moment, a pig looks directly and at length into the camera. The encounter reveals not an abstract category called “animal,” but an individual consciousness looking back. The camera becomes the site of an interspecies exchange in which intelligence, sensitivity, and mutual awareness are briefly made visible.
Writing on the Film
Scott MacDonald, “Perception as Transcendence: Interview with Paweł Wojtasik,” Film Quarterly, Winter 2011
A wide-ranging interview on perception, contemplative attention, and the transformation of difficult subjects through cinema, including discussion of PIGS.
Read the interview (PDF)
Anne Doran, Time Out New York
Doran describes PIGS as a painterly and unsettling work, noting its “Anselm Kiefer textures” and the disturbing beauty of the animals’ bodies as they surge together during the feeding sequence.
Video Data Bank
VDB describes the film as a close-range encounter moving between repose and feeding frenzy, with particular attention to the prolonged gaze of one pig and the questions it raises about the human-animal relationship.
Arsenal / Berlinale Forum Expanded, 2011
The Arsenal catalogue text emphasizes the pigs both as individuals and as a group, and identifies the extended, enigmatic stare of one pig as a key encounter in the film.
Hong Kong International Film Festival Jury, 2011:
“Marvelously abstract and perfectly concrete.”
Distribution
Video Data Bank — North American distribution and institutional licensing
Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art — archival and distribution access
View PIGS at Video Data Bank
View PIGS at Arsenal
View Paweł Wojtasik Videoworks: Volume 1
That compilation includes Pigs along with three related works
Awards
Hong Kong International Film Festival, 2011
Grand Prize, Short Film Category
Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Chicago, 2011
Second Prize
Selected Screenings
University of California, Santa Cruz, 2014
FLEX, Florida, 2013
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Oberhausen, Germany, 2012
Video Data Bank program
Athens International Film Festival, Athens, Georgia, 2012
Video Data Bank program
Hors Pistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2012
Hors Pistes Tokyo, Tokyo, 2012
Berlin International Film Festival, Forum Expanded, 2011
New York Film Festival, Views from the Avant-Garde, 2010
