If the BBFC insist on the cut I'm sure a quick email to Argento from Arrow will get the confirmation required that the shot in question was not set up purely for the purpose of shooting Inferno.

If the director tells the BBFC what they want to hear then they won't have any counter evidence so I'm sure a little effort from Arrow in the right direction before its too late should be able to convince the BBFC that this fairly minor bit of action can be let through

As far as "animal cruelty" in Italian films goes , this is pretty insignificant.
No turtle being cut open here

I remember watching Hidden and not think anything of that scene, presumably because the BBFC are so hot on animal cruelty that it must have been staged or faked.

That scene in Hidden looked 100% real to me. No tell-tale signs of CGI or anything like that. Presuming it was real, this killing was most certainly staged for the camera, as it's a pivotal element of the story, and served no purpose except for the sake of the narrative of the film. The chicken runs around headless as the boy watches on. I remember then wondering why the BBFC had passed it uncut, as it didn't look at all faked to me. Maybe it's because it's a quick kill? I don't know, but to my mind, I'm sure the animal objects just as much to a quick kill as to being treated cruelly.

So yes, this is an interesting case to bring up.

And here's a thought - since the BBFC won't cut stock footage if it hasn't been shot specifically for the film, couldn't Arrow dig out some cat/mouse nature footage and insert that instead..? :lol:

And that leads me to something else - if someone were to shoot a film and use excerpts from one of the cannibal films, would that still be cut as it's inserts from another work and not shot for the film in question..therefore no animal has been harmed in the making of that film..?

The BBFC don't like chickens! There were numerous chickens chopped up in The Pang Brothers 'Abnormal Beauty' too, which was released uncut.

I guess they class beheadings as 'quick kills'; so it's not 'cruel' enough.

Or, they just have a hard-on for Haneke. I found Hidden to be one of the most over-praised films of the decade.

I loved Hidden! :behindsofa:

A whole lotta people do, dude! :thumb:

I just found it boring! But I have that problem with Haneke - Funny Games is the only film I can make it through! I tend to snooze during his films. They're too lethargic for me.

So did I. It was one of the most intelligently written and classily filmed movies of the past 10 years and was, for me, one of the best 10 movies of that decade.

They certainly don't. They even passed the opening sequence of Pat Garret and Billy the Kid in which chickens, buried in sand, have their heads blown off in slow motion!

Sadly life isn't that simple. Arrow have appealed and there's nothing more that can done.

And they leave a chicken getting killed in a ritual in Mr.Vampire...

...but we're not allowed to see cockfights!