Rat Film
USA, 82 min, Documentary, English, Not Rated
Saturday, Jun 10, 2017 6:45 PM
MICHIGAN PREMIERE.
“If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.” –T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, 1936
The life and death of the brown rat. Those who keep them as pets and those who kill them for fun. Systemic disenfranchisement and economic inequality in the city of Baltimore. Street view computer simulations and their glitches. Crime scene investigations, both big and small. An eminently likeable exterminator. These disparate subjects and more are woven together into the kaleidoscopic and elliptical documentary Rat Film. Writer/director THEO ANTHONY wrings his subjects, studying them from all possible angles until they bleed into a single entity. A calm, detached narrator guides us through the mass, an anthropologist of our near-past and present day. Part ethnographic study, part nature documentary, part overwhelming polemic, Rat Film is an experimental look at Baltimore’s four-legged denizens and our human nature.