AFS Doc Days '25: Where the Trees Bear Meat

Death is an inevitability, Alexis Franco affirms in his documentary Donde Los Árboles Dan Carne (Where the Trees Bear Meat). Shown during Austin Film Society’s annual Doc Days, Franco’s film is an intimately quiet portrait of the modern Argentine gaucho shaped by the slow destruction of climate change.

Immediately, Franco moves his camera with the stillness of the Argentine landscape, while the narrative follows three individuals—a man, his mother, and his four-year-old granddaughter—as they navigate rural life. Their daily tasks are simple: managing the livestock, repairing a windmill, surveying the land. But when the livestock dies and fires engulf the drought-ridden fields, Meat evolves into a tale of survival instead of a deconstruction of the modern gaucho lifestyle.

Although the dialogue is sparse, Meat suggests there is a deeply rooted familiarity, a bond between the family and nature weathered by time and hardship. The granddaughter provides plenty of comfort, easily giving the film a voice that contrasts the dull tone it offers. Meanwhile, the near-silent interactions between the other subjects become the backbone of the slow narrative, revealing relationships not through words, but through plenty of rhythm and presence.

Visually, the cinematography is where the documentary succeeds, providing daunting and complex imagery. The introductory scene shows a cow’s lifeless body dragged behind a pickup truck, emphasizing the concerning environmental conditions of the land. This is later repeated when a cow that is initially alive, does and is dragged to an area replete with other dead cows. Another potent scene focuses on a raging fire that is described by the gaucho as common due to the persistent droughts. Destruction here paints an even greater and broader image of the fragility of the land. The cinematography works to Meat’s advantage as the camera does not rush but instead observes, and in that patience, its principal theme is exposed. Life, as shown here, is fragile, and death is inevitable.

At the heart of Donde Los Árboles Dan Carne is one certainty: death. In a post-screening Q&A, Franco revealed how the subjects we followed throughout the film are part of his family (the mother is Franco’s grandmother, the man Franco’s uncle), underscoring Meat’s emotional weight. He spoke of the importance of observation and the recognition of patterns, death being the center of it all, shaping both land and life. In this rural stretch of Argentina, the gaucho tradition is clearly eroding, worn down by climate change and economic uncertainty. Death, both literal and symbolic, becomes a lens through which to understand a fading way of life.

Interestingly, Franco’s documentary offers a view into a world rarely seen, one seemingly far removed from the capitalistic microcosm that dominates the United States. While some may find the absence of dialogue and exposition underwhelming, the film offers in return a meditation on mortality and cultural decline. What begins as an attempt to document a mythic figure instead uncovers something quieter, and far more unsettling: a culture slowly vanishing, and a filmmaker trying to make sense of the cycle of death.

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