FLESH FOR
PRACTICE

Full length documentary film project

"This miserable donkey,
bruised and cut by the stick,
is holier than Socrates
and greater than Platon".

Víctor HUGO

Sinopsis

In Cartagena de Indias, donkeys are used as a training object by delinquent youth gangs.
To understand the reasons behind these customs, the documentary will look at historical, religious, cultural, social, and mythological representations of the donkey.  
The investigation outlines the contradiction of the human thought in his value judgments on donkey that is simultaneously described as beneficial and demonic, powerful and humble, wise and ignorant.    

Background from the author

I was age seven, when I first saw the owner of a donkey hitting the poor animal with a stick with nails in the end.  I remember watching the donkey try in vain to raise himself from the ground.

Five years later, donkeys became a topic of conversation at school. The object of excited conversations among the other boys in my school as they recounted their sexual experiences donkeys.

At the time I was somewhat indifferent to the talk of donkey exploitation as I was young and immature. I did not take part in the activities but heard much about them from school acquaintances.

Later on, I witnessed something that would forever  change my feelings towards donkeys. I saw the remains of a donkey stabbed to death by a gang of young delinquents who had used the donkey as a “piece of live meat” to practice their knife techniques.

I was profoundly affected by this scene and many feelings filled my soul and it is this image in particular that made me want to produce a feature film on the subject of donkey abuse.

Without wasting any time, I plunged into a research which I had not imagined it would last more than ten years. From the beginning of the inquiry while aiming at the construction of the script, I noticed that an investigation had never been made on this subject and that nobody was interested in it.

So, I began to gather the motives of the criminal actions which donkeys were victims of, same as the motives allowing a society to deny its ethical principles when it’s about animals.

Regrettably; neither the investigation nor the access to the young delinquents was easy because of the gangs of the shady towns which forbade speaking about this subject.

To summarize: The causes were unknown, the subject matter interested nobody and my life was repeatedly in danger during my contacts with the delinquents who felt threatened by my questioning.

After that there was a period of enormous personal and economic investment, in order to discover the sociological universe characterizing them. If the theoretical approach was mastered, it was not the same for the shooting of the picture because I couldn’t manage to shoot or photograph these donkeys and keep a distant and academic position.

So, it seemed anti-ethical to me, to start a camera and then go away without doing anything to change this reality.  It’s in this context that I wrote the first version of the documentary with the idea to demonstrate an engaged effort, showing, from a donkey’s point of view, all the endured atrocities, this only with the objective to change the situation a little.

Indeed, I naively thought that a film could work for these donkeys which would die pitifully in front of the indifference of the people and of my own impotence. It is only two years later that I realized that I had seriously made a mistake and that my feelings had prevailed over the difference. I then noticed all the truthfulness of the words of the Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola: "While being conscious that a film can’t change neither the world, nor men, nor the ideas, we want to believe that it can help, even modestly, to a collective reflection ".

Adding to this disappointment, I had to rewrite the script looking for a new approach of the facts, this time more targeted at the origin of the attacks and their historic and psychological context.

The rigorous inquiry which followed brought me to the conclusion that the current fate of donkeys was the result of a completely contradictory millenary representation; no animal verifies so clearly the variations of depiction from men. So, the portrayal of the donkey goes from admiration for its patience, sweetness, modesty and working capacity, to depreciation and ridicule for its stupidity, stubbornness and wickedness.

For example, in the Christian religions, it is quoted in the Bible more than a hundred times in a completely positive way: it was present at the time of the birth of Jesus and especially in his triumphant entry to Jerusalem. Literature, on its part, uses the donkey as a precious moral tool and with philosophic values, since Apulee at the beginning of our era until the monumental Castilian poem "Platero y Yo"  by Juan Ramón Jimenez, going thru Victor Hugo who makes, in a discussion, the most stupid animal be in confrontation to Kant; without forgetting the fables of the Jean de la Fontaine.

But, at the same time they developed a negative concept, as shown in the Donkey, Seth's symbol (God of death and evil) in Egypt; dunce caps are given to the bad student, thus the saying "nasty as a red donkey". Undoubtedly the above mentioned animal was always excluded from the merits of his contribution to the human progress, and still today, to be on his side is considered often a sign of indignity and proof of poverty. All these pejorative values characterizing the donkey were completely absorbed by the Colombian culture, to the point to confer no significance for the life of these animals.

When I arrived to this conclusion, the conditions necessary for the realization of the film, it seemed to me, had been fulfilled.

And nevertheless, I again had to fill in, especially its narrative structure. The project still needed time, like me, who also misses the distance... very distance.

It is here where fate played its magical role, since for personal reasons; I left Colombia and came to live in France.

Finally my arrival on the French territory allowed me to understand my lack of recession in regards to the film, because I was until then, completely absorbed by the subject and invaded by these memories of donkeys being inexcusably killed. In the European field, and naturally due to the distance and the years lived here, I acquired the missing ideological maturity in "Carne de práctica", the separation from my country allowed me to refine my analysis and to envision the documentary clearly.

Finally, this progress of  many years determined the intention of the film: to leave the punctual violence which donkeys undergo in a given place, to show the universal complexity of the relationships between humans and animals, and our way of putting in perspective or distorting their image to the advantage of our societies.

Therefore, the full length film appears not only as an animal description through a donkey’s life, but also as an approach of the human nature and its anthrop-centered behaviors.

Nicolás ROMAN BORRE

Notes from the director

What interests me when I work on a documentary, is the freedom to use diverse media from art, (cinema, photo, video and paint).  

But the above mentioned artistic election is not an intellectual conceptualism, or a false experimental vanguardism, since I limit myself to using my personal taste and the same style used in all my previous films.

Indeed, I estimate that the concurrence of: Images in movement, of a camera; Photographs, that with its silver-plated granules have the power to capture unique moments in time; Paintings full of colors, textures and volumes…

Surpass the instrumental value of the image.

We need your help

Our aim is to finish the investigation about the human thought, thanks to the asinine cosmogony.

As the donkeys are the reflex of what the Man wanted to represent about them, the human being gave form on the quadruped, all the shortcomings that he himself did not want to have in his personality: submission, slowness, inclination towards the domestic tasks and slavery to  work..

After several years of bibliographical work, filmic and visual, the task is directed to gather the testimonies that specialists in diverse fields of the knowledge possess on the above mentioned animal, and thus, to extract the critical syllogism of the way in which we as species interpret the reality.

Because the complexity of the issue being studied exceeds the classic cinematographic mechanisms of production, plus the denials of the producing companies - because according to them, the work does not offer a commercial and financial potential-, we humbly request your vital assistance.

To see the light of day, the project needs funds for technical expenses, and also, pictorial works on donkeys, which will visually enhance the documentary.

For donations, the non-for profit organization "Association CIN-CO" Cinéma et Coopération has the following account open:

IBAN FR37 2004 1010 0408 6957 8G02583
BIC   PSSTFRPPDIJ

The plastic artists, who want to contribute:

The plastic artists, who want to contribute, have entire creative freedom and your work will be part of a traveling exhibition about the world. 

If you want to view additional photos and paintings of  “Flesh for practice”  click on the blog (warning: some images are difficult to view for their graphic content)

Thanks for your visit and your generosity.