Rat Film

Rats: four-legged fiends? Or unfairly-maligned beneficiaries of mankind's chronic inability to properly manage its urban spaces? Globetrotting photographer/journalist Theo Anthony returned home to Baltimore to address these questions--and many more besides--in his debut feature-length work, which has wowed critics and audiences since bowing at Locarno last summer.
This is an outstanding example of essay-documentary which, as Eric Kohn wrote in Indiewire, "brilliantly defies categorization" as it "careens from scientific observation and historical overview to spiritual inquiry with a freewheeling approach that never ceases to surprise, even as it maintains a cogent thesis."

For The New Yorker's Richard Brody, meanwhile, it's nothing less than "one of the most extraordinary, visionary inspirations in the recent cinema." Because, despite the blunt title, Rat Film is as much about people as it is rats. Anthony, interviewing a wide range of Baltimoreans--many of them occupying the more eccentric end of the social spectrum--uses his chosen subject as a prism through which to observe and analyse one of the most racially-segregated cities in the United States. The history, causes and consequences of that segregation--and its attendant inequalities and injustices--is Anthony's real subject here; he socks over his deadly-serious, urgently topical message with imagination, humour, wit and originality.

PIX POLITICS: the US

RAT FILM: BALTIMORE – THE STORY OF A DIVIDED CITY

Saturday and Sunday 10. og 11. June

Does Rat Film have anything in common with the TV-show from Baltimore, The Wire? What signifies the TV-series descriptions of the segregated city? Professor and The Wire-expert Erlend Lavik puts the film and the TV-series in context to each other as an introduction to the screening.

Theo Anthony (b. 1989) studied film at Oberlin College, Ohio and in Prague before working as a journalist, videographer and photographer. He reported from DR Congo for Agence-France Presse and his 2014 documentary short Chop My Money, shot in DR Congo, brought him wider international attention. In 2015, Filmmaker Magazine listed him among their '25 New Faces of Indie Film.'