That's my understanding of the situation. In my experience - and over the last 32 years I've had a surprising number of direct and indirect dealings with the BBFC over animal cruelty - they're generally only too happy to wave something through if you can produce reasonably convincing evidence that the footage qualifies for one of the two loopholes (the cruelty was faked/it would have happened anyway).GaryC wrote: ↑Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:00 amIt's a difficult one - I certainly don't approve of cockfighting as a sport and yes, the film does contain footage of it, some of it edited in. Much of it MIGHT get past the BBFC on the grounds that they were genuine cockfights that Hellman and his crew filmed and which would have happened anyway. But one key scene definitely won't get past uncut - the hotel-room scene, in which the fight was staged for the film and arranged for a particular outcome, with one cock wearing plastic spurs and the other steel ones. (I am not a lawyer and it wouldn't be me money spent if anyone did submit the film to the BBFC.)
For instance, for The Stranglers of Bombay they were happy to accept a comment from the since-deceased camera operator that the mongoose-vs-snake fight was bought in from an Indian documentary filmmaker, as this was corroborated by the visual texture of the film noticeably changing at those points - but they didn't demand proof that the original footage wasn't staged (which would of course have been completely impossible to come up with, and I suspect they knew this). It's basically legal arse-covering - they don't want to cut this stuff, and the fact that there's at least some evidence (even if it's not 100% clinching) to suggest that everything's OK vis-à-vis the Animals Act is likely to discourage anyone from going to the expense of mounting a private prosecution.
So with Cockfighter, as you say, the genuine cockfights would probably be OK - but I honestly can't see how the hotel room scene would get through unscathed, and any UK distributor picking up the film would have to assume upfront that it would be cut at that point. Which is presumably why nobody has picked it up, and nobody's likely to.