A film which has as its content the plight of a much loved
animal, the seeming villain a black religious group and the seeming heroes a
few white men has, at the outset, many pitfalls. And that it has these pitfalls
is good and right. If such features of a film did not instantaneously present
problems for it, we would still be living in the dark ages. So, perhaps, in a
sense, such a film is guilty until proven innocent.
Films about much loved animals which are on the brink of
extinction or are being cruelly treated generally evokes in me a sense of
trepidation. My trepidation is due to the high possibility of the film being
sentimental. Even without trying to be sentimental, stories about the plight of
an animal, particularly a beautiful mammal like a leopard, are in danger of
being so. Therefore, unless some sort of effort has been made to avoid this in
a film, it is bound to fail on this score. ‘To Skin a Cat’ remains sensitive to
the plight of the leopard without once resorting to oversimplified appeals to
blind bias and uncritical sentiment from its viewer. It does this by its use of
facts; facts about the animals, facts about the people, facts about the
dilemma.
The fact that the skins of leopards have been an important part
of the ritual activities of the Shembe people is not a situation which should
be commented on in a simple manner. History has too many stories like these,
spanning too many different groups of people, for the matter to elicit easy
commentary. This makes one of the primary acts of heroism in the making of this
film the ongoing attention given to the complexity of the situation. Another
such heroic act being the indubitably humane response of many Shembe devotees
to the plight of the leopard.
But instead of over stating the obvious in the script, and then
hoping that the resultant platitudes will convince the viewer, the film shows
the story of a rather eccentric, and definitely extreme, pursuit of a ‘true’
faux fur. This quest, spanning many years, takes a conservationist and graphic
designer all the way to China. Never before has thread count, exact shades of
brown and yellow, subtle variation in sets of man-made spots and the size of a
repeated pattern counted for so much. Never have lives depended on these
things. Never has a membrane made of some artificial fibre become a
spokesperson of such importance; a mediator between people and a champion for a
wild animal.
‘To Skin a Cat’ must have been a difficult film to make. The
social terrain is treacherous. But it has trod gently, lain low and pounced
quickly and true.
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