Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Hello and salaam. Dear listeners, welcome to History Speaks. I'm your host, Prashin Eqbal, and today I have the absolute pleasure of chatting with Dr. Natalie Hazant. She's an associate professor in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech and an ACLS fellow. Harisha dives into intersections of media, language and marginalization. She's written on television during the Lebanese civil war in her book Pretty Liar and co edited volumes on everything from atheism in Arabic speaking communities to the portrayal of refugees as animals. Yes, you heard me right. As animals. And even prejudice against non human animals.
Her current project is called the Mars Test, which stands for Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesm. She developed it with two colleagues. It's all about uncovering bias in cultural representations in ways that are totally fresh.
We'll get into that in more detail in a bit, so I'll leave the teaser there.
Now, a little personal tidbit. Many eons ago, Natalie was at Georgetown while I was doing my PhD.
I had the honor of being her TA for a year. She was absolutely fantastic and truth be told, a little intimidating.
But in the best way. She set the bar high and I learned so much from her. Fast forward all these years and here we are in a completely different setting and I'm still learning from you, Natalie, about the Oscars. Animation, racism, speciesism, and so much more.
So without further ado, let's dive into the first question I have here for you, which is what drew you to the study of the Oscars? Before you answer, though, let me give a tiny bit of context for our listeners.
The oscars began in 1929 as a cozy Hollywood banquet. Nearly a century later, they've exploded into a global spectacle watched by millions.
What started as an insider's dinner is now the stage where culture, identity and representation are both celebrated and fiercely debated.
One of my personal favorite moments came in 2020 when Parasite from South Korea made history as the first non English language film to win best Picture. It was truly an unforgettable night.
That said, the Oscars have long been criticized for a lack of diversity.
Black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities have often been overlooked, a reflection of broader patterns of bias in Hollywood, where opportunities and recognitions are unevenly distributed.
In 2015, activist April Rain sparked a viral conversation with the hashtag OscarsSoWhite, highlighting the absence of people of color among the acting nominees.
In recent years, calls for accountability and inclusion have grown louder, challenging the Academy to finally confront this history.
Natalie, I imagine you'll have a lot to say about that.
This push for recognition isn't just about Hollywood. It's about the global filmmakers who have broken through despite systemic barriers.
I'm a fan of foreign films, Iranian films being my absolute favorite.
And when the Iranian film A Separation by Askar Farhadi won best foreign language film in 2012, I felt a joy that's hard to put into words.
Finally, something as special as Iranian cinema was being recognized beyond the small circle of foreign film nerds.
Askar Farhadi followed his win with the Salesman in 2017, and even though he skipped the ceremony in protest of the US Muslim travel ban, his film cemented Iranian cinema's global impact.
With this brief overview, let us circle back to my original question to you, Natalie. What drew you to the study of the Oscars?
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Thank you for having me here, Roshan. It is an absolute pleasure to be a guest on your podcast and I am so impressed about how wonderful this podcast is and how really, really helpful it for us to understand in general history. I also want to give a shout out to my co authors, Ellen Gorsevsky from Bowling Green State and Tobias Linne from Lund University in Sweden.
So to answer your question, we make assumptions that we live in a global culture and that a country like the US Is a primary example where we can see the creation but also the consumption of that global culture.
However, is this culture really inclusive? Is it representative? Does it contribute to social justice?
I think that the Oscars, these prestigious awards, are an ideal site to explore exactly these questions over time, seeing historical changes.
And so when we chose the Oscars, we really chose them for that and for two other reasons.
First of all, because they are the longest running film awards. Like you mentioned, they have been running for 97 years.
In the beginning they had only 13 categories.
The ceremony was only 15 minutes. People had to pay $5 as a cover charge. And everybody knew who the who the winners were, you know, three months in advance.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I read that when I was doing research.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Exactly. But now we have 23 categories. It is a global event, it has global influence. It is broadcast in every single country in the world. So it is a truly it captures globally who how inclusive our media cultures are. Because unlike other genres, the Oscar movies and basically movies in general, everybody watches movies. So that must be something significant in terms of their influence.
We also know that not only they're broadcast everywhere, but there is something called the Oscar bump.
And sometimes some movies get up to 70% bump in revenue from before to after their nomination. Like for example, the shape of water got almost 50% bump because of the Oscar nomination.
So that must be, you know, significant to see, you know, the Oscars in their historical development, they're also considered to be great cinema. You know, people give an example, oh, this was nominated or it won an Oscar, meaning a really good movie. So we need to pay attention.
And that's really true in many cases, because Oscar nominees and winners, they influence public conversations beyond cinema. For example, a movie about the Iraq war, Hurt Locker, it really influenced the public conversation on so many different levels. For example, it talked about the legitimacy of war.
You know, like, it sparked a debate about the legitimacy of war and especially the legitimacy of the war in Iraq and how the US Population was really disconnected. It talked about veterans, mental health, and also about, you know, the gender in film leadership because the.
The director was the first woman who was ever nominated and, well, who won an Academy Award for best director. So we see that global influence and we can see, like, how really that important is. Even though it's not as important as it used to be, it is still the place to go if you want to capture some of the most important conversations that are being and changes that are happening in media and entertainment.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, as I was hearing you speak, I can sort of think about how Oscars and doing research for the podcast and reading the paper that you sent me, that Oscars are not just about film.
They shape global storytelling norms, but also, further, they shape how we perceive the reality of what is happening. Like you said, in the example of the Hurt Locker, that makes me wonder, out of all the possible genres, why you chose to focus on animation in particular rather than live action or something else. So if you could tell the audience why you have sort of decided to focus on animation versus, let's say, films or foreign films or action films.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Yeah, this is really interesting because, you know, animation is. It's really an important genre. But when we talk about the Oscars, people usually don't think about animation. They think about, you know, feature films, etc. But there are actually two reasons why specifically the animation categories, the two categories, you know, feature animation and short animation film, are really important to focus because, you know, social justice doesn't include, you know, only humans. It also includes other living beings like animals, whose lives are also affected by humans. And one of the two major genres that feature lots of animals is animation, the other being a documentary. In documentary, we don't see a lot of humans, so that was not the primary genre. And also, there are specific features of animation that maybe later we can talk about that, make it so important as a medium.
But humans, both humans and other animals, are featured in great numbers in animation. So that's one of the reasons. The other reason is how animation affects society.
So, for example, if we look at the movies that are top grossing globally, we see that animation ranks, always ranks in that top few movies.
And so what does that mean? It drives wide viewership.
So animation really has a major distribution and profits because they expect that people will go and watch the movies. And because of that, people who watch the movies, whether they want it or not, they are going to be part of this, you know, like, of that conversation. Even if it is in their own head, they're going to be affected in one way or another. That will become part of the input to the, you know, to the conversation that everybody's having in their own head, in their own life.
They are. Animation is a major source for early socialization for children, and it can inform educational policy.
But it's not just for kids.
Just look at South park. Look at the BoJack Horseman. There are so many animation movies that are made for adults as well. And actually the short animation category, some of it is really meant for adults.
There is.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, go ahead. I was going to say that when I was reading up on animation, I read a lot about how it is not only for children and it is for adults, too. And people get upset if you say it's only for children.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, studios actually make an effort, even for movies that are for children, to put some funny elements that the parents who are gonna take the children to the movie theater are gonna enjoy so that they would also have an incentive to go there, you know, kind of a little bit of a selfish incentive. But, I mean, animation has a darker side, and it's very similar to other genres that also feature this kind of, you know, creative visual culture. And that has to do with some, either visible or a lot of the times, hidden ideas that justify racism, especially dehumanization. And here, I mean, portraying human humans, for example, like an enemy, as an animal species, like a cockroach or pig or monkey, et cetera.
And so that hierarchy where some lives, some animals, some humans, are worth less than others.
And so here we see that it's kind of.
It's almost like a test ground to see how much you can push the envelope and what is acceptable at a given historical period and at a given culture, and to see, you know, what kind of images you can get away with. But these images become normalized through the treatment of how different races or human groups are treated or non human animals are treated.
So this is the second reason, that kind of vast and persistent influence.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: This brings me to my next question, which is slightly tricky.
How do racism and species connect?
And is it even valid to talk about them together?
[00:14:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, this is sensitive. I agree with you, and I think it is very valid. So to start, you know, what is racism? It's a bias and unequal treatment because of someone's race. And speciesism is a bias and unequal treatment because of somebody's species.
So here we see that they are kind of very parallel. But we can and we can and we should, when it's appropriate, talk about them together at the same time.
Because if we just talk about racism as kind of a problem between different human groups, we are misattributing racism just to that particular kind of exclusive, exclusive phenomenon. But look at that.
People like, let's take Trump's statement that migrants or immigrants are animals.
Why is this hurtful?
Because disenfranchised groups like immigrants, like Muslims, like Asians, gays, you name it, they are very often dehumanized. They're denied humanity. And not just that, but also equal moral regard and treatment.
And so here we look at this perpetual hierarchy that still exists. The Aristotle's ladder of importance that puts on the top white wealthy men, and underneath them men of color, then women, and then different types of animals at the bottom. And so in other living beings. But then you see that kind of ladder of value, and it still persists.
And as long as we have this hard divide between what we call humans and what we call animals or non human animals, until we have that, we are always in danger of dehumanizing any given human race or group.
So if we have this, what we call like a hard divide between humans and non humans, then the soft divide between different human groups, you can always bob one group up and down over or under the hard divide at any given moment, if there is a necessity, as understood by certain humans or certain organizations. And as long as we have this divide, we are always in danger of dehumanizing. So to basically protect that, it's not just enough to kind of rehumanize humans and basically say, oh, we are so different from other animals. But also research shows that showing empathy for other animals really smooths the lines and teaches us to be empathetic also to humans.
So that's one reason. There is multiple other reasons. I'll just mention a few. We often overlook the role of Agriculture in racial oppression.
For example, most workers, factory farms, in slaughterhouses, in meatpacking factories are immigrants.
They have no breaks, they have no vacation, they have no sick leave.
They have constant crackdowns by ice.
They live under dangerous, life threatening work on the kill floor. They have psychological damage and injuries are everyday experience. People get decapitated.
Minors are hired constantly. In fact, the hire of minors from other countries, migrants is such a big issue that even NBC made a documentary called Slaughterhouse Children.
So this is a huge problem, environmental racism. And that's a problem, let me mention here, both for dehumanized racialized groups such as immigrants, as it is for non human animals who are being farmed and then murdered.
And so one group is kind of used to hurt another, but both end up being hurt in these conditions.
Environmental racism, basically, this is all the industrial pollution from factory farming is kind of the big burden of that pollution is basically dumped on communities that are.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: Disenfranchised by either race or by color.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And so, and there is like other aspects of that. For example, the Amazon forest is being chopped off and beef farms are being created so that it can feed, you know, wealthy nations. But at the same time, it's not only a terrible treatment for cows, but you know, like people who used to live in these Amazon forests are being chased out and made into migrants and refugees. So this is environmental racism. And that goes back in history. Talk about what it's called, what is called dog biscuits. You know, when dogs are being trained specifically to be vicious so that they can beat unleashed on people of color in the United States.
And consider the harm that the black community has experienced over centuries. But also consider how these dogs are trained against their will. They are not only trained to be very aggressive and treated really badly while they're being trained, but they're very commonly being sacrificed in the line of fire because they're disposable.
And so we see all of these connections that historically really end and contemporary connections that make a lot of sense. So that we talk about kind of like looking at the intersections of these two injustices.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: I would say that before I read your work and all the material you shared with me, I don't think I had been able to articulate to myself that the ways in which humans devalue animals often mirror racism and the way we end up treating racialized humans.
So thinking about one without the other actually risks missing a fuller picture and risks like not letting us develop our humanity to its full potential.
Anyway, given this, I'm curious. Historically has racism played a role at the Oscars or in animation? Or is this more of a recent development? What would you say?
[00:21:29] Speaker B: I will say several things here, just to summarize, because you already pointed out one of these things. But I mean, racism is kind of a historical part of what we know about the development of. Of the entertainment industry and especially of the, you know, like Oscar nominations and animation, especially animation.
So, you know, in the beginning, a lot of animated movies, etc. They really played on stereotypes, especially of the black community.
And here we can talk about, you know, blackface and you name it, all of these kind of like very overtime racist depictions of these communities.
So blackface minstrelsy kind of faded out after World War II, but then it transitioned to a more hidden, but still a huge part of the continuation of these movies when television came to become really a global phenomenon in the second part of the 20th century.
And we see even later in the 80s, even more subtle representations of racism in animation. For example, tokenism, when there is, you know, like white characters are the main roles, but there is like, the black friend, you know, the sidekick. So everything, you know, they are different in Chocolate, but only superficially.
And they. We don't see any of the really main concerns and the standpoint which is of the most important value of these characters. We don't see their real lives in their communities, how they live, how they're harmed or not.
We just see that kind of superficial inclusion over there.
Or when racism is being attributed in animation movies to just one evil character who is racist, but we don't see that and everyone else is not exactly that structural racism. We don't see it talk about, not just about stereotypes, which I, you know, which that kind of is, but structural racism in the film industry in who is hired, for example, to voice the characters. They are faced with so many barriers to being hired, to equitable pay.
Even, you know, black movies face barriers to distribution especially, you know, like, they're marginalized.
And so this is. This is still a big problem and a big concern, even though I have to say the industry has been making significant, you know, improvements. And I'll talk about that a little bit later when we talk about our sample.
So it's not just, you know, it's just like, terrible.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: It's not all bad news.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: There are some improvements and. Yeah, we can talk about that later.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: I was going to say that what I was struck by when I sort of read your paper was how animation allows for the visual flexibility that other mediums do not. And so Then it is possible to, to overtly and in subtle ways show racist portrayals that you wouldn't be able to show if you were just using humans. So I found that sort of connection really fascinating, which makes me ask my next question, which is why was it necessary to create a new tool like the Mars test that you and your colleagues have created instead of using existing frameworks?
[00:25:40] Speaker B: So, yeah, we created a new test because we wanted to analyze the Oscars. And we chose a sample of, give or take 10 years, actually like nine years.
And we had a lot of movies over nine years. This is, you know, about 90 movies altogether. So how do we analyze 90 movies?
What kind of tools that are going. It's not just one movie where you, you do a qualitative deep dive into the movie, into the background, into everything. But it's 90 movies. We can hardly do a deep dive. We need to do something that is a little bit more efficient. And so we looked at what kind of, you know, mechanisms or strategies there were to analyze that, especially when we talk about racism and speciesism at the same time and how they interact, intersect. And we didn't find much. We found tests that specifically look at, you know, racism or look at, you know, the role of gender, like the Duvernay test and other tests. And we also saw some standards that have been developed, you know, like an ideal to, to live up to when we talk about the treatment of animals, of non human animals in the media industry.
But there wasn't something that really want could use to apply to our sample. And so that was basically, if it doesn't exist, we have to create it ourselves. And this is what we did.
So the Mars test, like you mentioned, the media analysis of racism and speciesism, actually has three groups of questions and they are kind of divided into questions that are related to animated non human animal characters, questions that are related to animated human characters, and then questions that are related animated intersections. Each of these three sections has five questions.
So it's a 15 yes and no questions.
And basically the test is good to be used both for quantitative analysis because you can have a sample of movies and you can literally go, yes, no, yes, no. And the more yeses you have, the more you will be able to say that there is a lot of racism and speciesism in the sample. The more nos you have, it means the less you have, or maybe you don't have much. And so that is a good quantitative tool, but it is also a qualitative tool because when you want to dive into specific examples like we did in our article.
After the quantitative analysis, we chose certain questions and we came up with themes based on these questions. And we developed a qualitative analysis and we found a lot of interesting themes that we could not really discover without these questions.
Let me give you an example of some of the questions, please.
Yeah. For example, are the non human animals captive or treated with violence?
That's one question. Another is, does the film ignore or misrepresent human and other threats to non human habitats and to welfare?
Questions related to racism? Do the racialized characters fulfill harmful simplistic or racist stereotypes? And in some of these questions, we really benefited a lot from earlier versions of tests about racism. And in animated intersections, does the movie devalue characters in a way where race and species intersect? And here we can talk about dehumanization.
Are there characters that are being dehumanized in the movie and in what ways?
Or are non human characters used to basically poke fun of a particular human group?
Another question is, does the movie hide or make light of the role of animal agriculture in racial oppression?
Does the movie imply that the struggles against racial oppression and against species based oppression are incompatible or they're in competition with one another? For example, we can't talk about example, you know, speciesism because we're still dealing with racism. And until we fix racism, we can't really touch that. And there is no space for, you know, for both. If we do both, then, you know, we do injustice. So this is some of the thinking that, you know, we see in some of the movies. And that's why we, you know, we said we need questions to basically make this apparent. So those who want to analyze important movies can have a good structure, a good strategy where we explain. This is the question, and this is why we have this question. And this is how we can apply it to our sample.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: I will say that when I looked at your test, then I did a little bit more research on others, I knew of the Bechtel Test and DeWalt Test, but then I found out that there are so many others out there that you can use, not necessarily for animation or non human animals. But I'll say that I found your test to be surprisingly accessible. And it is designed both for scholars, critics, creators, and even casual viewers who want to evaluate a film's treatment of humans and non human characters and if they wanted to sort of be able to highlight the problematic patterns.
So I want to ask you, when you applied this test, the Mars test, to the Oscars animated film within these nine years, what are the most striking or surprising findings you discovered that the audience might sort of find interesting and illuminating.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: Yeah, well, some of these findings were that the majority of the movies scored really badly on the treatment of non human animals. The results were terrifyingly bad.
And cruelty to animals was the number one category that was, you know, like almost pervasive everywhere. So that was really, you know, scary to discover.
We discovered other things, such as, because in terms of racism, we didn't discover the same terrible tendency. Actually, we discovered that is much better than the treatment of animals, which was kind of encouraging. But later I will talk about more. I'll mention also stuff that is also concerning.
We discovered that there was some improvement in the representation of certain groups. For example, we saw that there was an increase in Asian representation in our sample of nine years.
We like, you know, got double the numbers of movies from the previous, like 15, 16 years before our sample. So, you know, it's really. We see how this is a huge represent, like jump in the representation.
Unfortunately, a lot of them have to basically go to, you know, like either Korean movies or, you know, maybe Japanese movies. So there isn't as much variety.
But still we see an increase in that. We also see an increase in how culture is treated in general.
Like maybe giving tribute to other cultures in movies that feature environments from, you know, like a Chinese family or like a Mexican family.
Movies such as over the Moon or Coco. And when we have these kind of main characters and main stories, we see a lot of multicultural casts.
So, you know, like, culture basically is kind of being more honored than it used to be previously, however, which is heartening.
Yeah, yeah, this is, you know, this is a good tendency. However, we don't see the same improvement for the representation of African Americans. We see kind of stagnation. There were movies definitely that were good movies, but we did not by far see that jump. And so, you know, that is something concerning. Another concerning feature was, you know, it's kind of a racist way to represent a racialized human group in animation where from a human they suddenly become a non human.
And in many cases, in the majority of the movie, they kind of like are shown as a non human. Like Princess, what is the name of that movie? When she becomes a frog in the majority of the movie, she remains a frog.
And so that has been noted previously in our sample, we discovered that we had six movies, more or less, that switched from, you know, like a human into a non human.
And if we look at their cultural background, they were, you know, half and half, like half of the Movies, you could say, have white humans who become animals and the other half have, you know, humans of color or, you know, minorities, Asian or black.
So on the face of it, we may say, oh look, this is, you know, like equal treatment. But actually, if you dive deeper into that, we notice that when white characters switch to non humans, they suddenly gain more power. They become empowered, they become superhuman in a way. They, you know, like, they can discover like new fishing ground in Luca. Or they become, you know, their hearing becomes fantastic. They become very fast, like in Wolf Walkers.
But when, you know, racialized groups, characters from a racialized group switch into a non human animal, they become disempowered. For example, in the movie Soul, which is about a black musician who kind of like really wants to.
He's a teacher of music, but he wants to perform. And as soon as he gets his big break and is going to perform with this kind of like group, he falls into a manhole and dies. And then he comes back as a cat.
When he comes back, he actually moves into the body of a cat. And so imagine a cat playing the piano with her cat fingers. That was the male cat here with his cat fingers. Or, you know, talking to, you know, to other musicians or, you know, like, how is a musician. This is huge disempowerment.
Or in the movie Turning Red when the little girl becomes so enraged she turns into a big panda and starts like. And. And is so embarrassed and is angry and starts, you know, like kicking everything and like breaking, etc. This is really disempowerment.
So we notice that these things still persist.
There was another theme that we kind of called elsewhere as solution.
For example, when non human animals suffer, in some movies they are showed to suffer persecution from humans. Like in Wolfwalkers. This is a movie about Ireland and the colonization of Ireland by the English during the time of Oliver Cromwell. And the movie shows that exact period.
It portrays the Irish as a rebellious group that is really close to the natural world. And that's why we have the wolf walkers, basically werewolves who can switch between human and non human. And so these are the Irish rebels against the colonization. And they kind of like live in the woods together with the wolves. And so we see that and they kind of fight together.
But at the end of the movie when the English colonizers say, we want to kill and wipe out all the rebels and all the wolves from the woods, which is actually what happened, they killed the whole wolf population.
The solution that the movie portrays is like, oh, we are going to take all the Wolves and just move somewhere else.
Where is somewhere else that you can move huge populations of wolves?
The same story is with how to train a dragon. How to train your dragon number three, when, you know, dragons were persecuted and killed and et cetera. And the solution was to send them to a secret world where nobody can touch them and they can live free.
Where is the secret world? Where is the secret world where you can say, Irish, send Irish rebels that are not going to oppose English colonizers? Maybe America, but like, where is the secret world? So we saw these, you know, themes that are still persistent. This, you know, there are other themes as well, but there is a lot to. To be desired.
[00:40:09] Speaker A: I wondered if just quickly you could speak a little bit about Middle Eastern or Muslims in reference to animation, if you found something, if there's something interesting that you sort of saw.
[00:40:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that is very interesting. I'm just gonna say, even before the animation for main feature films, I kind of like looked at who was nominated.
And for example, for a best actor, out of 481 movies, only one person was nominated. Riz Ahmed in 2020, you know, like kind of a Muslim actor.
[00:40:48] Speaker A: And it was a big deal.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: Exactly. Or for supporting roles, you know, let's say for. For best actress in a supporting role. Out of 926 choices, one person was nominated in the movie House of Sand and fog in 2003. This is a huge missed opportunity. And the same goes for best Picture.
Three times the same person was nominated. Ismail Merchant from Britain.
And documentaries had a little bit more representation, but most of them were about the Syrian war or now about the Palestinians or about the Arab risings in 2011.
So there was a lot of missed opportunities in terms of animated movies.
In our sample, there were only six.
And so we ended up in 2024. But there was another one that a short movie that won in the Shadow of the Cyprus in 2025. So if we include that, it is like seven movies out of 240 choices, this is about 3%.
[00:42:07] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: So 3% nominations, you know, for, you know, the Middle east. And one of them was an Israeli movie. So it is. The situation is really.
There is an invisibility. Yes, a great invisibility there. And I have to say that these nominations, nominations came 2018, 20, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25. So in the last few years we are seeing a little bit more.
But before that it was really dire.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Even if you went like, let's say if your sample set was not nine years, but 15 years your numbers would go down by like almost half.
So based on your research, what changes could Oscar make to better represent the Middle East Muslim communities, people of color, people on the margins, in any and the non humans.
[00:43:05] Speaker B: Also, I have to say that stories.
Well, basically think about this one word, perspective and standpoint. Well, the word is standpoint, but we can understand it as, as somebody's own perspective that comes from their own needs, from their own goals, from their own life history and life world.
So that standpoint is what we think is the most necessary thing to develop and to strive towards in future animations.
In terms of how Middle Easterners are represented, we do need a lot of stories that are made by Middle Easterners and so that they kind of represent themselves.
And because that industry is not well supported in most countries. You mentioned Iran, and I applaud that mention because Iran has a very well developed, developed, you know, film industry. But a lot of other countries, they are struggling to support a film industry. And so financial support is definitely needed to pour into Middle Easterners who create themselves and hire themselves and represent themselves. So that is really important. And then casting a wider, you know, glance to go and you know, kind of like include, nominate more movies from the Middle east because sometimes they are just, they just can't get through a lot of hurdles, throw a lot of barriers with characters that portray not stereotypes, even if stereotypes are positive. We don't need stereotypes. We need diversity. We have a lot of diversity. You know, in movies that are created about, about the United States or even, you know, Western Europe, we don't have as much diversity visible globally about the Middle East. And the Middle east is a very diverse place with so many differences, with so many, you know, like, you name it, we need to see that diversity. That is something that we know we should see.
And the last thing that I should say is that, that said, it would not solve the problem of how we portray non human animals. And if Middle Eastern movies represent non human animals in the same ways that I mentioned before, with a lot of cruelty or with a lot of invisibility, or just treating them as props, as food, as symbols, like some of these nominations actually have, then it would not help towards, as I said, removing that hard divide because it still remains. And even in their own movies they will have to, you know, constantly represent themselves as more human than these animals and push the animals lower and lower and give them no moral significance, whereas we want to see the opposite tendency. And I want to give a shout out to a movie, to the movie in the shadow of the Cyprus, which actually represents the displacement both of veterans of wars, like the Iranian wars in Iran, I think it was the Iran Iraq war.
And also the displacement of non human animals from global warming. There was a big whale that ended up on a beach.
And so that movie really is a short movie, but it shows that vulnerability across different species, across racialized communities.
It is not an ideal movie. There is still some stuff to be desired, but I really hope to be seeing more movies like that. I hope to be seeing more movies from the standpoint of the communities that are represented. And when it has to do with non human animals, we really argue for the projected or standpoint that is our closest interpretation to what could be a standpoint from non human animals because they can't speak human language. And tell us. But, but we have a lot of biological science. We have a lot of, you know, discoveries by scientists that really tell us what exactly are their natural desires, natural goals, natural standpoint. And so we can be really close to that and be informed by that science to, you know, basically say, represent them in these ways. And here I want to point to other movies. One of them is called Flow, which won the Oscar for a feature nomination.
Animated movie this year, a fantastic movie about the effects of global warming on non human animals.
And the other one is Pit Bull, a short movie that really talks, really represents the animals from their own standpoint as much as possible, but also represents kind of like interracial communities and how they really treat animals and how animals are kind of like live and coexist with them in a very, very charming way.
[00:49:04] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing your expertise and walking us through the Mars test and it's finding.
It's been a real pleasure to have you on our podcast. Natalie, thank you.
[00:49:14] Speaker B: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.
