A Case study on animal advocacy documentary films as educational tools by Claudia Alonso-Recarte

A Case Study on Animal Advocacy Documentary Films as Educational Tools Animal advocacy documentaries have for long served the purpose of educating the public about the cruelty and devastating environmental effects of animal exploitation industries. The “manufactured consent” to speciesist practices instigated by the media and protected by legal and political frameworks is contested in these types of films, which have collectively devised narrative, argumentative and cinematographic strategies to shake or discomfort viewers enough to bring themselves to ask pertinent questions about speciesism and their own role as consumers. The amount of storytelling techniques and their carefully crafted connections with nonhuman animal imagery and sound has been explored by filmmakers and advocates since the 1980s and resulted in significant scholarly input. Using theories on documentary film and animal ethics as a support system, the object of this presentation is to describe and discuss the problematics, logistics, strategies and learning outcomes behind the experience of organizing screenings of these types of films in a commercial movie theater in Valencia, Spain. Funded by research projects, we have organized two film cycles (2023, 2025) in which a selection of six films is presented throughout six consecutive weeks. For each session, a guest speaker who is an expert on the film’s subject is invited to present the film and, after the screening, prompt a debate about key issues with the audience. This presentation aims to address issues such as the following: (1) logistical difficulties; (2) facing skepticism and resistance from funding institutions; (3) selecting a corpus of films that may more successfully lead to (re)educating the public; (4) finding suitable guest speakers; (5) targeting and attracting different types of viewers with varying interests in animal ethics; (6) effects of different filmic strategies on the audience; (7) viewer involvement in post-screening debates and discussions; (8) creating relatability and instilling empathy in the audience; and (9) assessment of the level of success and failure of the cycles. About the Speaker Claudia Alonso-Recarte is Associate Professor in English at the University of Valencia, Spain. Her research revolves around the field of (Critical) Animal Studies, with a particular interest in representations of nonhuman animals in film. She is the founder and director of the research group “Animals in Literary and Visual Cultures” (CULIVIAN) at the University of Valencia, and is currently the principal investigator of a research project granted by the Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura, Universitats i Ocupació (Generalitat Valenciana), titled “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Animal Advocacy Documentary Film in Twenty-first-century Western Cultures” (CIAICO/2023/046). She has published in journals such as Critical Studies on Terrorism, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Studies in Theater and Performance, Men and Masculinities and Atlantis, among others, and is currently working on a monograph on animal advocacy documentary film.