rat film

DIRECTOR: THEO ANTHONY 

What can we learn about a society from the way that it treats its lowest ranks? In this brilliantly inventive nonfiction essay, filmmaker Theo Anthony explores the catastrophic failures and prejudices of urban society via the life of the humble brown Norway rat in the city of Baltimore. Featuring a wide-ranging and surprising collection of zealous back-alley rat-hunters, street-wise exterminators, mid-20th century scientists, and racist city planners, Anthony has crafted “an ethnographic and sociological nonfiction horror film” ( Filmmaker Magazine) with “a distinctive authorial voice … in debt to his mentor Werner Herzog” ( The Hollywood Reporter). Named one of the ten best undistributed movies of 2016, Indiewire.com called Rat Film “fresh and inventive,” and “a striking combination of analysis and creative innovation that communes with the past and present.” Co-presented with Run of Life.