Animal Rights Are Human Rights

Ukrainian animal rescuer and animal rights activist Anna Kurkurina lives in Mykolaiv, a city heavily impacted by the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, in southern Ukraine. Besides fighting for animals, she is a former biology teacher, a world champion powerlifter, a personal trainer working with disabled people and a proud lesbian. Therefore, animal rights activism might not be the sole most important part of Anna’s multi-faceted personality, but it indeed was the origin point of the film: the filmmakers said in an interview^[1] that Anna caught their attention even before the war in Ukraine – she was protesting for and taking in stray animals living on the streets of Mykolaiv that would otherwise have been killed by authorities.

Tetyana Dorodnitsyna and Andriy Lytvynenko also shared^[2] that at first, they mistook the traditionally rather “male-presenting”, short-haired, extremely muscular Anna for a man. It is, thus, not surprising that questions of gender identity and expression, along with an LGBTQ sexual orientation, are present in the film; however, they are – deliberately – not explicitly explored and are a lot less prominent than other aspects.

Despite the documentary’s clear focus on Anna’s animal activist side, the use of the Nicholsian Observational Mode^[3] in Everything Needs to Live lets the audience see the parallel between Anna’s and the animals’ lives as they resonate quite beautifully yet tragically with each other. Both Anna and the animals helped by her are peripheral beings, castaways of society, in a way. The common main reason for their position is the Russo-Ukrainian war. The war being the main driving force behind the suffering of both the people of Ukraine and the vulnerable animals left without care means that in Everything Needs to Live, unlike other animal rights films, the perpetrator of the violence is an abstract entity: the war itself.

In fact, Anat Pick warns about the possible drawbacks of trusting the objectivity documentary filmmaking promises to offer^[4]. According to Pick, documentaries, especially observational documentary filmmaking with its heightened presumed objectivity and ability of “chronicling and evidentiary functions” can have its limitations, particularly when it comes to layered topics such as animal rights: “the validity of cinematic observation” can be threatened by the very representational strategies and artistic solutions employed by the film.

But Tetyana Dorodnitsyna and Andriy Lytvynenko are not in a need to have a forced claim other than what we could summarize as “animals’ lives are precious”, thus the camera doesn’t have to be the conveyer of any other evidence than showing how animals are impacted by the ongoing war in Ukraine, which is already evident on its own. You can have your own “unguided and unguarded” gaze, without a pre-existing interpretation from the filmmakers that would or could undermine the “objectivity of the cinematic apparatus”^[5].

In Everything Needs to Live, there are no classic perpetrators (e.g., animal producers or processors), and violence is not explicitly targeted towards animals. In this film, there are only suffering animals so here visibility can’t become “the cloak of unseeing”^[6]: in a war you don’t have some greedy capitalist organization defending standard operating practices because there is no organization and no such thing as standard operating practices when it comes to the treatment of animals in areas affected by war. Animals are on the periphery, looked right through and forgotten about, until Anna Kurkurina comes and takes them in. Thus, Everything Needs to Live enters the otherwise confined territory of war, successfully “exposing hidden realities to bring about political change”^[7].^[8]

Also, this film is not only, or rather, not primarily about the violence committed against the animals living in war-torn Ukraine, and the suffering they have to endure, rather the heroic efforts Anna Kurkurina puts into rescuing them. But, moreover, in Everything Needs to Live, human rights and animal rights are intimately intertwined with each other, because, in addition to all the above, Anna Kurkurina, not unlike the animals in her care, is also subject to vulnerability on other levels than those caused by the war. Her isolation comes – or at least could come – not only from being isolated in many ways from the world at peace, but from being an “outsider” as well – meaning that “going against the mainstream” by not conforming to societal expectations of sexual orientation, gender roles etc. can have an alienating, if not worse, effect in the eyes of the rather conservative population of Mykolaiv or Ukraine in general. Similarly, the abandoned animals in Ukraine are already vulnerable without the immediate, physical threat of the war: without their owners, they lack care, emotional stability and even a proper place to live.

Tetyana Dorodnitsyna and Andriy Lytvynenko’s documentary is obviously a story about animal rights in the context of war – but it is also and no less a story about Anna Kurkurina, her immense everyday efforts and the difficulties she has to face as an activist, a woman, a lesbian and ultimately a human being – thus unifying animal rights and human rights in a powerful documentary feature.

References:

Nichols, Bill (2017). Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Pick, Anat (2016). „Animal Rights Films, Organized Violence, and the Politics of Sight”. In: Tzioumakis, Yannis, & Molloy, Claire (Eds.). The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics. London–New York: Routledge. 91–102.

„If You Need that Light Coming from Your Heart, Your Heart Needs to Be Broken” – Interview with Tetyana Dorodnitsyna and Andriy Lytvynenko on Everything Needs to Live (https://youtu.be/J-O8EufLVf4?si=XmXRshiEReE3Xi2Z)