‘The Rabbit Hunt’ Quietly Tracks Tradition and Modernity
July 26, 2018 7:12 PM   Subscribe

The Rabbit Hunt (2017) Every weekend, seventeen year old Chris and his family hunt rabbits during sugarcane field burning and harvesting in the Florida Everglades.

Patrick Bresnan, fitting some poignant anthropology into his tightly-shot documentary, films one season’s session in The Rabbit Hunt. From start to finish, from the teens riding hoverboards to chasing fleeing bunnies with their hunting staves, Bresnan finds a peaceful stability.
posted by JamesBay (4 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
That was a lot of sugar he put on his cereal in the beginning, my teeth ached just watching.

I liked the film a lot, thank you for posting.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:58 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


Thanks for posting this.

I'm occasionally surprised when I see (either a picture in an article, or a documentary like this) when I see a slice of life in the United States that I was completely unaware of - and this documentary is exactly that.

I'm adding a couple links because aspects of this documentary piqued my curiosity (and other people might have had the same questions/thoughts so I might as well drop the article here for others, too). I had questions such as - Is this dangerous (i.e, there is a fire + heavy machinery, and in more than one instance during this short film, people got very close to it). Because of that I also wondered: Is this done in collaboration with the farmers, especially if there is an element of risk.

The articles are here and here, and I'm just adding a quote about an aspect of these hunts in the local area that was fascinating (to me), which was about the mythology of rabbit hunting in the local area:

As I learned more through interacting with the workers I came to understand the mythology surrounding rabbit hunting in the Glades. Kids believe that if they become the best rabbit hunter, they will be the most likely to make it to the NFL


From the second article,...Local lore has it that the Muck, as this part of south-central Florida is known, produces so many fast football players because they grow up chasing rabbits. That’s an oversimplification. It’s not that they chase rabbits. It’s that they find it necessary to chase rabbits....

Decided not to include links to articles about the safety since they weren't definitive and addressed deaths of children during rabbit hunts during the burning of a sugar cane field in Honduras, for example, but it would be hard to conclude that conditions are similar or different, etc.

Thanks again for posting and sharing the documentary.
posted by Wolfster at 9:48 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


This 3rd generation [former] rabbit hunter (though mostly it was just recreational dog training with a dash of competition and a hunt here and there) thanks you for this post.
posted by RolandOfEld at 6:47 AM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sheesh. From the link, a two-star review: "There are a lot of these 'artfully point the camera at something alien but mundane' short docu-flicks, and this one does nothing to stand out from the crowd. The editing is just a 'watch-it' record of events, and so has no impact - all events in life don't linger equally, and it's the job of a narrative to show that."

This was just NOT my experience watching this. I thought it was gorgeous, humane, and I felt a bunch of interweaved narratives both in the people it is following, the small world that they occupy and how it got that way within the larger world that we all occupy. I feel almost bad for this clod of a reviewer. What film did this person watch?
posted by dirtdirt at 9:01 AM on July 27, 2018


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