The first ever film by director Franny Armstrong (The Age of Stupid, McLibel, Drowned Out), TRUTH OR DAIRY, is a light-hearted and fast-moving introduction to veganism.
Presented by vegan poet Benjamin Zephaniah, the 20-minute promo video made for The Vegan Society way back in 1994 features music from Moby and appearances from well-known vegans of the '90s, including River Phoenix, kd Lang, Bryan Adams and Uri Gellar.
The film is thought to be the first ever example of a crowd-funded film, as it was paid for by £7,000 raised from small donations from individuals.
As far as we know, it is the first film ever made about veganism - unless anyone knows of an earlier one?
Franny wrote in 2019:
"Watching Truth or Dairy now, I’m struck/reminded that :
1. Benjamin Zephaniah doesn’t age.
2. Video graphics have come on just a bit.
3. My preoccupations - and writing style - have changed not one iota…. “So in a perfect world, everyone would be vegan, there'd be no global warming, the ozone layer would’ve got patched up and nobody over the age of 30 would be allowed into raves, but so what? We’ve heard it all before, nice film Ben and all that, but what do you want me to do about it?”
4. We contacted River Phoenix, along with lots of other vegan celebs, and were completely thrilled - dancing round the room thrilled - to get a faxed reply from his mother/manager on a Friday saying that he would film a special message for our film. That Friday must have been the 29th October 1993 as the very next night, in the early hours of Sunday 31st October, River died of a drug overdose.
5. We’d spent every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night of the last year dancing to Moby's seminal rave track “GO”, amongst many others, so when he sent us a hand-written fax - decorated with the first smiley face I’d seen - offering us free use of his tracks as “a musical bed” we were in heaven. Despite having no clue what a musical bed was.
6. All the issues are just the same now as they were then, except more so: “The destruction of the rainforests is not just bad news for both the human and the animal inhabitants of the forest, but also for every living thing on the planet that needs oxygen to breathe”.
7. The sparkly Northern Irish cameraman who clandestinely shot the rainforest scene with us late at night in the MTV studio in Camden - permission to be there had not entirely been granted, had it Arlene O' Sullivan ? - is now the world-famous Oscar-nominated cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.
8. Katherine Monbiot, the vegan arm-wrestling champion at 7.46, was the sister of George Monbiot. She tragically died a couple of years after we made the film.
9. When we were filming spoon-bending Uri Gellar, the battery on our microphone died. “Sorry, I’ll just run to the car to get another”, I said. “Give me that microphone”, replied Uri, and he held it out at arms length and concentrated his magic mind-bending powers on bringing the battery back to life…. He handed it back to me... I plugged it in and…. it still didn’t work. So I got a new battery from the car.
10. The rainforest-destruction scene at 14.35 was initially written as a clown taking away the pot plants, rather than a burger, but the Vegan Society bods put a stop to that saying that McDonald’s were too litigious…. hadn’t I heard they were suing two activists who’d criticised them over a leaflet? …. (Little did I know that that story would be the next ten years of my life - and us not-including McDonald’s in this film was an example of McDonald’s using the threat-of-litigation to silence their critics into not speaking before they even speak…)
11. After I'd spent the best part of two years writing, producing and editing the film - unpaid obviously - at the launch party at My Young's Screening Room in Soho, the boss of the Vegan Society, made a speech thanking everyone. He ended with "and there's one person whom we must thank above all else, without whom none of us would be here blah blah" - I readied myself for a modest smile and wave ".... thank you so much, Benjamin!". I was flabbergasted - of course Benjamin was brilliant, but he'd done 3 days work and I'd done two years! My Dad, Peter Armstrong, leaned over and said "Get used to it, people always think the people on screen have made the film". Wise advice, Dad, wise advice.
12 - infinity. Most of all, how much I miss being one half of the Armstrong Sisters (see the final credit). My sister Boo, who died of cancer in 2012, and I made every frame of the film together - she was the front half of the pantomime cow at 4.37, the dancing feet at 4.17, the person weighing the spinach, the person collecting the receipts, the person throwing the chicken head, the person persuading the chip shop to let us film there, the person walking through the shouting protestors outside McDonald’s (see point 9) as she went in to buy a Big Mac for a prop...
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