Rural residents in east North Carolina are being shit on. That’s the crude but literal way to put the very grave injustice captured in The Smell of Money, Shawn Bannon’s infuriating documentary about the harm committed by factory farming against humans, animals and the environment.
The film captures the toxic hog waste produced in North Carolina’s concentrated animal feeding operations, which is then sprayed across fields near people’s homes, producing a foul and debilitating stench that has severe health impacts. Longtime residents like Elsie Herring and Rene Miller (who spoke out in a Guardian investigation on the same issue) are among the few who resiliently stand their ground and continue to fight back. They do so despite police harassment, intimidation and other insidious attempts to silence them in a state where many citizens are employed by the same industry.
The main culprit in the film is Smithfield Foods, the pork producer behind Nathan’s Famous hotdogs and Healthy Ones cold cuts. The company’s slogan boasts “Good food. Responsibly.” According to The Smell of Money, Smithfield Foods is largely responsible for the 10 million hogs crowded into North Carolina feeding farms. They create over 10bn gallons of waste, which is poured into greenhouse gas emitting lagoons (again, full of shit) that also cause incredible environmental devastation when overflowing after a flood or hurricane.
“It’s so fucked up and unbelievable,” says Bannon, responding to how the mostly Black residents, whose ancestors lived on the same land since the days of slavery, are slowly being suffocated by pig feces, while most of the US ignores the problem.
“This is one of those things that’s very easily fixable if people just pay attention,” says executive producer Travon Free, on a Zoom call alongside Bannon. “That was why it’s so enraging to see the film the first time. It’s not complicated.”
We’re discussing how this issue has been allowed to persist and grow for decades, while slowing killing people and the environment. Free brings up the boiling frog myth, which is frequently used to describe our complacency on matters such as civil liberties and the climate crisis. As the saying goes, if you put a frog in boiling water, it will immediately leap out. But if you put it in lukewarm water and gradually increase the temperature, it will allow itself to be boiled to death. The analogy may not be scientifically accurate, but the point stands as far as the unresponsiveness of the public and politicians when it comes to destructive factory farming practices among other issues.
“It’s not in your face,” he says. “It’s not in the news. It’s not being thrust at you in any meaningful way all the time. It’s easy to ignore it. Black people suffer from environmental injustice all over this country, right? It only matters to who it matters to. It’s a microcosm of what we experience at a macro level with things like climate change. It’s also a fault of the human condition. You only care about what’s causing you immediate pain, most of the time.”
Both Bannon and Free are on the call from their homes in Los Angeles. The former is making his feature debut with The Smell of Money, after spending years filming about the impacts of factory farming while also making experimental shorts and some behind-the-scenes documentaries on David Lowery’s films A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. The latter, a writer and comedian who has credits on The Daily Show and won an Oscar for the short film Two Distant Strangers, is helping get the word out after he was encouraged to see Bannon’s film by activist DeRay McKesson.
I’m taken by the aesthetic contrast between the two collaborators and their environments. Bannon, who grew up in Ohio, has his movie library behind him along with a sea-foam green Rivendell bike that matches the modern lounge chair and a wall-mounted expressionist painting he made himself. Free, a Compton native, wearing a ball cap that reads “Art is dangerous,” is sitting in front of stacked bookshelf, which is flanked by the hundreds of Nike sneakers (mostly Jordans) contained in clear plastic shelving.
Bannon and Free appear worlds apart. That just speaks to how this film tends to bring together a diverse array of bedfellows. Joan Jett and Joaquin Phoenix and his partner, Rooney Mara (sister to executive producer Kate Mara), are among the big names who hosted The Smell Of Money screenings over the past week to get the message out. “It’s a lot of very antisocial people,” says Bannon, having a laugh at the makeup of the team corralled around him.
The different voices rallying behind the film also mirrors the intersection of activism – environmental, animal rights and human rights – that The Smell of Money speaks to. But even with a story that draws in groups and benefactors with aligned causes, Bannon struggled to find funding support to tell his story the right way. On that front, he found so much allyship to be transactional: “They all wanted their message to be on top.”
Bannon says he walked away from potential partners who felt entitled to the story, and tried to impose on him how it should be told. “I literally had to tell people to fuck off because they’re so aggressive. I probably shouldn’t say this in an interview but I’m just amped up right now.”
He credits his producers for backing up his fight to protect the story Elsie and Renee trusted him with, after they had risked so much to tell it. He refused to compromise their words, fall into an industry trap that would decenter them and make white saviours out of the lawyers and organizations assisting them, or allow those rich donors to turn the issue into a vanity project, as so much charity, according to Free, tends to be.
“You get to do the whole ‘Look at me I gave money to this place,’” says Free. He’s speaking critically of all the wealth he sees poured into New York or Los Angeles charity events, where very little money is directed at the people who need it most.
He’s an advocate for more direct injection, imagining what it would mean for one of the US’s more than 700 billionaires to simply fix the problem – giving $100,000 to alleviate Rene Miller’s medical bills, for instance, as she treats her asthma with a nebulizer machine.
“I could just use 0.01% of my wealth and change their lives,” says Free, performing the choice. “Or I can tell Shawn how to make his movie.”
The Smell of Money is out in select LA cinemas now and will be released in New York on 20 October with a UK date to be announced
