"Imagine you go to heaven and a pig opens the door..." the master butcher demands of his apprentice. At first glance this seems macabre, at second glance it seems profound, and on longer viewing it tells of an existential drama.

Exactly this pattern is followed by David Spaeth's 90-minute documentary in which we get to know and possibly love, or at least appreciate, animal-loving people when we accompany them as they kill animals.

A young apprentice with great ideals, a routine head butcher in Europe's largest cattle slaughterhouse, two women taking a slaughtering course... - the slaughtering main characters of the film talk about their actions without shame, far away from all clichés and amazingly open. What at first actually seems macabre soon becomes above all honest and intense - and circles around a deep dilemma. Loving animals and eating them at the same time, hating death, but loving salami... can that go together?

Meat-eating humans have managed to suppress the fact that they eat animals. Ingenious? Or unscrupulous? The film goes to those who are at the beginning of the chain and face the facts - to those who do the killing. What do they repress, what do they feel, what do they dream about?

A production of eikon media, in co-production with SWR and BR, supported by MFG and FFF.