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Following animal photographer Jo-Anne McArthur over the course of a year, THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE illuminates the lives of individual animals living within and rescued from the machine of our modern world.
With the exception of our companion animals and a few wild and stray species within our urban environments, we experience animals daily only as the food, clothing, animal-tested goods and entertainment we make of them. This moral dilemma is often hidden from our view.
This multi-award winning documentary gently removes our blinders by illuminating the lives of individual animals living within and rescued from the machine of our modern world. Through the heart and photographic lens of acclaimed photographer Jo-Anne McArthur, we become intimately familiar with a cast of non-human animals. The film follows Jo-Anne over the course of a year as she photographs animal stories in North America and in Europe. Each story is a window into global animal industries: Food, Fashion, Entertainment and Research. THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE charts McArthur's efforts to bring wider attention to a topic that most of humankind strives hard to avoid. Are non-human animals property to be owned and used, or are they sentient beings deserving of rights?
60- and 92-minute versions on the same DVD
SDH Captioning for the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing
Director and Writer: Liz Marshall
Producers: Nina Beveridge and Liz Marshall
Featuring Jo-Anne McArthur
Editors: Roland Schlimme and Roderick Deogrades
Cinematographers: John Price, Iris Ng, Nick de Pencier, Liz Marshall
Music Score by Bob Wiseman
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"Incredible and forward looking film...The Ghosts In Our Machine invites us to reflect on the attitudes and norms of our so-called exceptional contemporary culture as we meet individual and named animal beings - cows, turkeys, dolphins, chimpanzees - whose pain, suffering, and death are a major part of why our species makes claims of superiority and domination over other animals...[This is] a very important move in the right direction."
Marc Bekoff, Psychology Today