User Reviews

"Auf der Jagd - Wem gehört die Natur?", also known as "Who Owns Nature?" is a new German/Canadian German-language documentary from 2018 and the most recent work by experienced Bavarian female filmmaker Alice Agneskircher, who has been active in thee industry for over 2 decades already. This one runs for slightly over 1.5 hours and as the title already gives away, the focus is on hunting. Hunting animals to be precise. The film starts off with hunters giving their insight on this activity and we see some scenes, some bloody, so my fellow vegetarians who are a bit more sensitive may want to keep their distance here. Anyway, even if I do not support the activity of hunting, they made some good statements and it was necessary to depict the violence and the moments of dying because this is really what the film is about. Another thing I liked is that it is never really about taking sides, just about depicting the events and the concept as a whole. And hunters are right if they say that it's crucial to kill the animal as fast as possible and that it may not be as gruesome as what is happening in our nutrition industry. Another moment that stayed somewhat memorable is when we see early on a wolf kill a deer in a much more gruesome manner than the hunters do. Still, the question of necessity is imevitable. After wards, in the second half, the film moves into other departments, briefly into food industry, but really just minimally and this could have been left out altogether. Then there are a few sequences about actually necessary hunting as it comes down to protecting particular green areas from animals doing harm to them before the film closes with the concept of wolves in Germany and what is done for and against them. All in all, a pretty decent summary on the subject I would say. Agneskircher's experience clearly shows and I also liked somehow that they let the interviewees and images speak for themselves without narration most of the time. It felt right. this is not a film that will push you into one direction or the other on this complicated subject, but it is one that may broaden your horizon. The only thing I did not really like at the very end (or did I) was really how we see a pastor at a church make a positive statement about the hunters as it really may have been too much against the general idea of life and the commandment "Thou shalt not kill". So maybe I was not exactly spot-on early on when I said this is not taking any sides as this scene and the scene I mentioned with the wolf brutally killing the deer may turn the overall outcome in a slight tendency pro-hunting. Anyway, it probably won't be too easy to get a hand on this movie outside of Germany, but if you do and maybe if you live in North America especially, then also look out for those scenes in which Indian tribe women describe their spiritual connection with hunting. I personally must say that the part where she talks about the moose coming to her to provide his meat did not convince me at all and it was perhaps the weakest moment of the film. But it does not want to be 100% correct and fitting for every opionion on the subject and it's one of many parts where the film offers a great deal of room for discussion. Go see it.