It would be a personal ad to attract only the bravest soul: Sterilized, misanthropic, widely-hated vegan atheist with no time for romance seeks fellow traveler for demonstrations, public theater and animal rescue.
I Am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA spends some time in the life and mind of a woman some would brand a nut and others a revolutionary. Since the group’s debut in 1980, president and cofounder Ingrid Newkirk has been the public face of PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Newkirk has served her cause both behind the podium and on the streets, participating in the kind of demonstrations involving fur and red paint generally left to a movement’s younger, friskier shock troops.
Year of the Dog without the whimsy, Matthew Galkin’s documentary I Am an Animal gives both sides of the PETA debate and leaves no doubt as to Newkirk’s eccentricities. A scarily intense Englishwoman with an extreme devotion to animals, upon her death Newkirk has left instructions for her flesh to be barbecued and made into leather goods in order to illuminate the plight of animals.
Newkirk comes under attack from multiple fronts in Galkin’s film, mostly because of her preference for media-whoring sensation-generating, shock and awe. PETA cofounder Alex Pacheco and fellow animal-rights activists like Friends of Animals’ Priscilla Feral complain that PETA’s methods often drown out the group’s message. But it is hard to argue with the group’s successes, pressuring companies like GM and L’Oréal to forgo the use of animals in product testing and bringing an element of radicalized protest back into an increasingly tranquilized American life.
At its heart Galkin’s documentary is an honest portrait of a not entirely likable and far-from-cuddly revolutionary. Some of the most ludicrous but also most telling footage in the doc is of Newkirk and staff indulging a lone Butterball turkey liberated by a PETA employee from an Arkansas slaughterhouse. Speaking in dulcet, nanny tones, Newkirk leaves her escaped turkey to rest and recuperate from his ordeal in a straw-lined PETA office, switching on some classical music in her wake.
To counter such mildly frightening touchy-feely animal-ardor there are the videos shown over the course of the documentary which can do nothing but bolster Newkirk’s case. Undercover footage of animals being skinned alive or of lab monkeys looking like nothing so much as terrified nursing home patients speak their own truth. Some of the sadism and mistreatment of animals shown and recounted is so grotesque; the impression of abject human cruelty lingers for days afterwards. Having witnessed human savagery in all of its banal, daily manifestations it is clear why Newkirk has shrugged off the judgments of the human kingdom and sought the philosophical company of the world’s innocents.
I Am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA spends some time in the life and mind of a woman some would brand a nut and others a revolutionary. Since the group’s debut in 1980, president and cofounder Ingrid Newkirk has been the public face of PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Newkirk has served her cause both behind the podium and on the streets, participating in the kind of demonstrations involving fur and red paint generally left to a movement’s younger, friskier shock troops.
Year of the Dog without the whimsy, Matthew Galkin’s documentary I Am an Animal gives both sides of the PETA debate and leaves no doubt as to Newkirk’s eccentricities. A scarily intense Englishwoman with an extreme devotion to animals, upon her death Newkirk has left instructions for her flesh to be barbecued and made into leather goods in order to illuminate the plight of animals.
Newkirk comes under attack from multiple fronts in Galkin’s film, mostly because of her preference for media-whoring sensation-generating, shock and awe. PETA cofounder Alex Pacheco and fellow animal-rights activists like Friends of Animals’ Priscilla Feral complain that PETA’s methods often drown out the group’s message. But it is hard to argue with the group’s successes, pressuring companies like GM and L’Oréal to forgo the use of animals in product testing and bringing an element of radicalized protest back into an increasingly tranquilized American life.
At its heart Galkin’s documentary is an honest portrait of a not entirely likable and far-from-cuddly revolutionary. Some of the most ludicrous but also most telling footage in the doc is of Newkirk and staff indulging a lone Butterball turkey liberated by a PETA employee from an Arkansas slaughterhouse. Speaking in dulcet, nanny tones, Newkirk leaves her escaped turkey to rest and recuperate from his ordeal in a straw-lined PETA office, switching on some classical music in her wake.
To counter such mildly frightening touchy-feely animal-ardor there are the videos shown over the course of the documentary which can do nothing but bolster Newkirk’s case. Undercover footage of animals being skinned alive or of lab monkeys looking like nothing so much as terrified nursing home patients speak their own truth. Some of the sadism and mistreatment of animals shown and recounted is so grotesque; the impression of abject human cruelty lingers for days afterwards. Having witnessed human savagery in all of its banal, daily manifestations it is clear why Newkirk has shrugged off the judgments of the human kingdom and sought the philosophical company of the world’s innocents.
