Treatment

Title: Sentirse: (in Spanish it means “to feel”)
The focus of my video essay will be on what it means to feel, and how that makes us human. It will explore and compare evidence of feeling in many different animals, most notably the contrast and comparisons between primates and humans. There will be clips, taken from a documentary named “Ape Genius” and a few youtube clips showing the wide range of ape emotions including sorrow and happiness, as well as a few human characteristics, like playfulness and friendship. The ape clips will be meshed with clips taken from youtube, as well as film I’ve gathered, portraying human emotions. I hope to include sound bytes from students and professors explaining their ideas of animal vs. human emotion, as well as interviews from my friends recounting particularly emotional moments in their lives. I will juxtapose the sound clips with the visual images. For instance, if a friend is telling me about how much they love their sister, I will show infant chimpanzees playing in a river together so that the human and ape emotions appear very similar. I want to show that our emotions, which we often feel are explicitly human, are shared with other creatures not that much different from ourselves. I will close the film out with clips of humans from a variety of cultures and countries in suffering, so that my conclusion is: If we are capable of relating to other species through our emotions, should we not be able to relate to our fellow man better? Should we not help? These clips I will take from youtube videos of commercials for international aid programs. I am also toying with the idea of tying the whole video together through images of hands, primate and humans, as they express emotion and language. Maybe there will be a short clip of someone hand writing an emotion, like love with a pencil and paper. There is a great video by a band I really like, The Rocket Summer’s “Do you Feel?” where people open up their palms to ask “Do you Feel?” or say “I feel.” And I might use clips from that video.