lebqueen I found out about animal activist and photographer Jo-Ann McArthur a few years ago after I became vegan. I loved the authenticity of this doc film, as it was reflective of Jo-Ann's raw agonizing experience photographing and witnessing face-to-face the animals in exploitative industries, watching the suffering and feeling totally helpless, knowing the only thing she could do was document the atrocities and make it known to the masses all the wrongs and suffering occurring among the most vulnerable and helpless. A must watch...may it open your mind and heart to not only opt out of the fur and other skin industries but to live vegan.

leslia30 This is a beautifully done documentary. If you love animals' it is not to be missed. The four -leggeds, the winged ones, the ones who swim. They are all here, as Humans are here, to live out their lives to the best of their ability. Did you pay attention? Even after suffering, never being shown compassion,no "normal" living space,no care past being kept alive, either long enough to get fattened up for the kill, or long enough to suffer pain and mutation......EVEN THEN the rescued ones,bear no hatred of humans. They deserve LIFE. Life as Creator meant for them. I feel like I may be preaching to the choir... How do you get this movie in the living rooms of Corporate America?

Shel Graves This beautifully told tale follows photographer Jo-Anne McArthur as she takes photos of individual animals used for entertainment, fashion, food, and research and seeks to bring her work to a wider audience.It's the story of one woman following her calling and passion. She sees herself as a war photographer. She wants to save the world. Her work as a McArthur's clear counterculture mission is animal liberation. The film follows her vision of animals as sentient beings who deserve to live their own lives for those lives' sake, not as as means to human ends. She documents animals' confinement and suffering.It's an intriguing vision and watchable filled with gorgeous cinematography and many soulful eyes (sometimes filled with confusion and pain, but the film also shows images of animals at peace and pleasure).This is director Liz Marshall's first animal rights film and she said after watching many other films in the genre she purposefully chose to steer away from more graphic images. It's often visually pleasing and even funny. Even so, it's overall effect is heart-wrenching.Much of the film's power comes from its juxtaposition of images that contrast McArthur's conscious awareness of animal interests with the general disregard and commoditization of animals displayed in the dominant culture.McArthur works to document and bring to light what industries take great pains to hide — the abuse of animals behind their products. She seeks to stimulate people's natural affinity with and compassion for animals to change these cruel systems.Therefore, the film has a keen awareness of the animal origin (and the lives injured and cruel systems behind) products commonly seen and displayed while walking down a city street.It's a perspective worth considering and a film worth watching.

Ezra Winton Ghosts is a film that offers the hope of attracting those who care and those who don't, a documentary that will embolden the converted while likely influencing more to join the choir (or at least check out the song book). It is a documentary that refuses to preach, instead opting for a beautifully constructed homage to the rest of our kingdom, spilling over with a unique and thoughtful cordiality that is born out of unmitigable love, respect and understanding.The documentary is a refreshing departure from its more rational-minded predecessors that throw facts and data at us while barraging audiences with violent sounds and images of slaughter and torture. Ghosts instead confronts with the unforgettable grace of animals many of us so easily shut out from our daily thoughts, as industrial capitalism distantly spins its cogs of exploitation on farms, in labs and factories and abattoirs.These are the ghosts – the winged, the four-legged and the otherwise objectified and disgraced cousins gasping for life below us on the commodity/food chain.Marshall doesn't throw the sixties wrench into the cogs of the machine, screaming from a mantle of righteousness that what we are doing is morally, ethically, ecologically wrong. Instead, she introduces proximal empathy into the abysmal space between consumers and capital with a powerful effect that hits both the mind and heart with an enduring resonance.Through the various actions and efforts of the very talented and committed photographer Jo-Anne McArthur the film quietly sneaks into the obscured and horrific spaces of mink farms and other places where animals have had their essence as sentient beings barbarically debased into commodity form, lingering just long enough to occlude forgetting.Both the photographs and cinematography in the film are stunning, and viewing on a small screen should be avoided – Ghosts is a visual delight, despite the sometimes difficult scenes that unfold. A confident direction shines through in this skilfully shot and tightly edited doc that is also audibly adorned with an awesome score and soundscape. The beauty of the film's artifice somehow does not aestheticize suffering, nor create Hallmark images of the animals documented – instead the richness of sound and images helps us through tough spaces, punctuating moments we might otherwise wish to shut out or alternately, not have registered as worthy of contemplation.Yet we do not spend too much time in the most violent of animal oppression spaces, and by focusing on the beauty and individuality of the many animals (who have names and personalities) that McArthur documents, including and crucially the relationships between committed humans and the broken and discarded, Ghosts brings us in close and personal and squeezes tight.It's a warm and inviting embrace that the film offers, one that builds empathy for these creatures over its 90 minutes, and it doesn't relinquish after the closing credits.I didn't feel yelled at or schooled, but I do feel implicated and educated. To the benefit of Marshall and others who worked on this film (and by extension, to McArthur) those feelings of implication and elucidation are wrapped in beauty, love and understanding.If I sound warm and fuzzy it's because this film's compassion and sensitivity are comforting sensations that just might be the right mixture needed to deliver a documentary on animal rights that transcends the earlier discussed divide and invites everyone in without compromising its politics, while not shutting out others, in spite of its politics.