A hunter’s lyrical reflection on the humbling business of being mortal

In To the Bone, the US writer, naturalist and self-proclaimed ‘philosophical hillbilly’ Johnny Carrol Sain considers his place within the natural order after hunting and harvesting a deer in the Ozark National Forest. Contemplating the rhythms of ‘solar-powered recycling’ that have existed since the dawn of life one Earth, Carrol Sain finds both profound significance and profound ordinariness in the act. And yet, as he notes in his warm Southern accent, he can never quite come to accept his own inevitable death as unremarkable, having ‘been too long at the top’. Adapting a longer essay by Carrol Sain, the Iranian-American filmmaker Andy Sarjahani’s meditative treatment culminates in an unusually thoughtful perspective on hunting and, indeed, the humbling business of being mortal.