Film
22-year-old Nejma (Oulaya Amamra) works on a bull farm and trains to win the next Camargue bullfighting competition – a contest where participants must face a bull in an arena and remove objects placed on its horns without killing it. As Nejma struggles to thrive in this very macho environment, mysterious deaths attributed to a wild beast start bringing out fear in the population. Inspired by the traditions of her youth, Emma Benestan delivers an empowering film that is part Western, part genre fare.
French-Algerian filmmaker Emma Benestan was born in Montpellier in 1988, just a few kilometers from the Camargue region. She graduated from the Fémis in 2012 and was part of the crew on several films like Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) and Mektoub, My Love: canto uno (2017) before making her feature debut with Hard Shell, Soft Shell (2019). Animale moves away from the romantic comedy and harkens back to two of her older documentary short films – one of which was about a trainee bull farmer (Facing the Beast, 2018), the other about a woman partaking in Camargue bullfights (Prends garde à toi, 2019).
Selected filmography
2016 – Goût bacon (short)
2018 – Facing the Beast (short)
2019 – Prends garde à toi (short)
2019 – Fragile