Les Damnés: Des ouvriers en abattoir

Overview

Slaughterhouse workers—some of whom are still on the job—describe their work. Their accounts reveal the toll that this “world apart,” on the fringes of the human condition, takes on the workers’ health. The film captures the struggle that the men and women working in slaughterhouses must wage against their own emotions in order to “hold on” day after day. Through their fragmented accounts, the mental images that haunt them are gradually revealed, and at times we can sense all those they would prefer not to share. Filmed in the forest, a symbolic space of refuge and isolation, the documentary shows no footage shot inside a slaughterhouse.