ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the remarkably large and diverse range of vegan advocacy films that have been conceived, financed, produced, distributed, and promoted over the past fifteen years, from no-budget productions and crowd-funding campaigns to the involvement of streaming services and Hollywood celebrities. It explores how such films tap into related discourses such as speciesism, animal rights, health, climate change, and celebrity culture to bolster their arguments for adopting a vegan diet and/or lifestyle. In this context, it is interested in the narrative strategies employed in these films and in whether their central emotional appeals are targeting viewers’ self-interest, their capacity for trans-species empathy, their moral sense of social and ecological responsibility or, as in the case of Simon Amstell’s mockumentary Carnage, their sense of humor. Through these different routes of analysis, I hope to give insight into how vegan advocacy films get made and what narrative strategies they use in order to reach not only other vegans but also people who might happen upon them for whatever reason and find themselves challenged to change their lives.
