Bull / Toro
2023 · 6m · UK
Directed by Sarah Tremlett
Genres: dark comedy, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, theatrical
A darkly comic mime-cabaret poetry film in sonnet form: a mime artist as the bull, on human aggravation and compassion for animals.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A mime doing sonnets about a bull—yes, exactly the kind of "wait, what?" collision of high form and physical absurdity that makes other scouts nervous and me certain they're missing the point. Tremlett's refusal to pick a lane (poetry? slapstick? animal ethics?) is the whole game.
Tremlett positions herself squarely in the lineage of performance poetry and avant-garde cabaret, and the sonnet form gives the work a formal scaffolding that justifies its theatrical excess—though one wonders if the mime conceit occasionally overwhelms the craft it's meant to serve.
The choice to let the mime's body do the actual argument—to make silence and gesture carry the weight of the sonnet's moral reasoning—is the decision that rescues this from gimmick into something genuinely unsettling.