“A melancholic portrayal of rural life and a sad demonstration of how it feels to have things at arm’s-length but not being able to extract anything from them”

In Where the Trees Bear Meat, Alexis Franco turns his camera to the farmer Omar, his nonagenarian mother, and his four-year old granddaughter, to show the harshness of daily life on the Argentinian Pampas, as this family and others living in the area face a prolonged drought that by killing their livestock exposes the fragility of human life in times of climate change.

Franco’s camera is in full-observation mode as he tries to distance himself from what he shows, almost to highlight the current state of the region without the mystification of the gaucho folklore. The result is a melancholic portrayal of rural life and a sad demonstration of how it feels to have things at arm’s-length but not being able to extract anything from them. The land is there and is theirs, but there is no grass to feed the cows. The wells are already built, but there is no water to fill them up. The cows are alive but some are not even capable of standing on their own.

It is by focusing on the animal life as much as it does that Where the Trees Bear Meat succeeds best, for it has a lot to say about the fear and despair of the proximity of death, and it does so by using the constant mooing of the cows as a link between everything that is happening on screen. The cows are seen dead and being dragged by a car to what can be best described as an animal mass grave. They are seen trying to stand upright and failing. They are seen and heard, almost during the entire film, mooing out of hunger and thirst. And unlike Omar’s resilience and attempt to make sense out his situation, the animals cannot do the same. There is no sense to be made, only their suffering.

Curiously enough, Where the Trees Bear Meat‘s strength is also its weakness, for the humans are often silent and their portrayal feels cold, maybe as a result of Franco’s choice of trying to distance himself as much as possible from any romantic approach of life on the Pampas or from the drought. So while there are some beautiful and intimate moments shared by Omar, his mom, and his granddaughter, in the end these moments feels too distant for something so intimate as daily life of a single family, and at the same time too small for a larger conversation about climate change and how human life is already being affected.