This New Short Film Will Turn You Vegan in 2 Minutes: LCA’s “Casa De Carne”

Winner of the 1st Place Tarshis Film Award at the 2019 Animal Film Festival
Written and Directed by Dustin Brown
Produced by William Martens and Dustin Brown
Executive Producer Chris DeRose
Cinematography by Mark Mannschreck
Edited by Dustin Brown
Associate Producer and 1st AD Nura Ashimova
Starring Joe LeMieux, Gintare Bandinskaite, Mantas Valantiejus, Ryan Sherman

Sources Last Chance for Animals (LCA), Live Kindly
By Charlotte Pointing

Would you eat at Casa De Carne? It sounds exotic, upmarket, and even stylish, the perfect place to dine with friends. But what if you excitedly ordered the baby back ribs and then were faced with killing the owner of those ribs yourself? Not quite the evening of understated elegance the name Casa De Carne promises at first glance.

Casa De Carne translates directly to “meat house” and in this restaurant, whatever animal you order from the menu, you slaughter yourself, before she is cooked and served to you. It sounds shocking and barbaric. It’s also entirely made up (ish).

Animal rights organization Last Chance for Animals (LCA) created a two-minute-long film set in a fictional fancy restaurant, Casa De Carne. Eric innocently goes out to eat with friends, he orders the ribs, and all is well until the twist is revealed: he is handed a knife and shut in a room with a pig; if he wants to eat the pig, Eric must first kill her.

Unsurprisingly, he can’t bring himself to do it, instead opting to pet the animal. But the chefs at Casa De Carne don’t mess about and Eric is forced to watch while a butcher slits the throat of his dinner for him.

“Eric’s experience sheds light on hidden truths, in addition to raising some very important questions that all of us should ask ourselves,” notes Kinder World. Because the uncomfortable reality is that the ribs only end up seasoned on a plate because somebody else did what every fiber in Eric’s body was telling him not to do.

He isn’t alone; a study from September last year revealed that half the population of America could not take the life of an animal for food if they had to do it themselves.

LCA’s thought-provoking film was awarded the first place Tarshis Short Film Award at the Animal Film Festival. Held in partnership with the Animal Film Festival, the award ceremony offers cash prizes for short films that “successfully, creatively, and convincingly highlight the issues of animal suffering in modern farming, food production, and/or laboratory research.”

Last year, LCA produced Food for Thought a short film portraying a world where humans keep goats and pigs as pets and eat parrot and poodle meat for dinner; the clip was awarded second place: