'There is a war coming and we need an army of vegans', Tal Gilboa tells a group of fellow vegans in the film. But 'One Angry Vegan' is not about being one angry vegan. It’s about the price of activism.
SHIRA FEDER: ‘In 2012, there were 70,000 vegans in Israel. But most Israelis didn’t know what the word vegan meant. In 2018, at least 5% of Israelis are vegan. In Gil Golan’s “One Angry Vegan,” which premiered at the Chelsea Film Festival, he sets out to document the militant vegan whose star ascended as she became the face of a movement. “There is a war coming and we need an army of vegans,” Tal Gilboa tells a group of fellow vegans in the film. Gilboa cuts quite a figure, with her unkempt blonde hair, her rarely matching socks, her all-caps ANIMAL LIBERATION tattoo, the intensely Israeli way she gesticulates when she talks, and the visibly raw sadness that fuels her fury.
In some ways, she’s the perfect face of the Israeli vegan movement. She’s a good-looking mother of three, a real sabra, and a former officer of the IDF (“but also a free spirit,” her husband Eran Yuz is quick to clarify), and the winner of 2014’s Israeli “Big Brother” and the founder of the Israeli Animal Liberation Front. But “One Angry Vegan” is not about being one angry vegan. It’s about the price of activism, it’s about the radicalness of female anger, and it’s about the way modern activism involves seducing the media for those headlines that fuel interest in the mission…
Vegans have chastised them for ruining vegans’ reputation, while carnivores, of course, think they are too radical. Goldin and Gilboa’s version of veganism is one that declares carnivores as evil and wrong, that demands that carnivores beg an animal’s forgiveness. Gilboa grew up close to her sisters, but now she rebuffs them because they eat meat. “They aren’t bad people,” her husband tries to interject. “If someone served you human babies, would you just go along with it?” she snaps back. Today, Israel is full of angry vegans just like Gilboa’. SOURCE…
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