Malj (1977)

Yugoslavia 11m, Colour
Director: Aleksandar Ilic

The mallet is an incredibly simple and disturbing documentary set in a chicken hatching plant, where newborn baby chicks are sorted from a conveyor belt which carries the dead, injured or otherwise unacceptable chicks toward a large handheld hammer that crushes them into a refuse bin. The monotony of this unfeeling industrial process is punctuated by a single defiant black chick which turns around and runs back up the conveyor belt, but who is repeatedly turned back by the workers toward the mallet. Though the event was apparently unplanned, Malj sends a powerful message along the lines of Food Inc. (2008), about the rarely seen cold brutality of the modern food industry (Klaus Ming January 2016).