Review of Freshwater Assassins

"Assassins d'eau douce" or "Freshwater Assassins" is a black-and-white documentary that runs for slightly under half an hour and it is one of filmmaker Jean Painlevé's longer works. There is no denying he was a pioneer when it comes to the genre of animal documentary and he made this one here shortly after World War II. It is in french like his other works, so if you really want to understand every bit of it, you may need a good pair of subtitles. I personally have some of his work and found this one not too interesting. But that is just subjective as the animals depicted in here, mostly water creatures, but no fish, aren't something I am too interested in. Still there are a couple decent video recordings as usual with Painlevé, so it's not a failure at all. It is also pretty brutal again in terms of animal violence among each other.