牧牛日记 Diary of Cattle

In Indonesia, in the Padang district, an open landfill site borders the forest. A landscape of precipitous terrain, with its crest lines and its chasms, serves as a pasture for several hundred cows. Amidst the dance of the diggers and trucks discharging their loads onto the slopes of a mountain of rubbish, a herd makes its way through the chaos, in search of something to graze. This nightmarish decor in which bovines live, copulate, play, sleep and die, becomes the scene of an appalling spectacle. Lidia Afrilita and David Darmadi’s choice to give the film a unity of time, place and action—a day passed among the cattle in their pasture of plastic and waste—condenses the absurd and appalling reality of our world, observed here with unusual frontality and lucidity. Between realist tragedy, horrific fable and nihilistic comedy, this diary of a cow is impossible to forget.