The mysteries of life and death are some times so simple, and manage to pop up in the oddest places, in the most unusual circumstances when you’re a child. If anything, “Lechón” explores how traumatic life can be, and how sometimes you’re better off not knowing certain details of how we live. For our young character here, he loses his innocence, discovers the concept of death and a lot more than he really needed to know. Riding across the countryside one day, Emilio goes far from his home and breaks the chain of his bike. He stops at a farmhouse where he meets an old man who volunteers to fix it for him, and then discovers the man is a lechónero, a pig butcher; and a rather boastful one at that. A simple question about what the man does immediately propels Emilio in to learning life’s lessons of death, and of food. “Lechón”, is a charming and fascinating short film about how innocence is lost, and Emilio loses his by simple curiosity and the barbaric practices in grooming pigs to be cooked for food. “Lechón” really does declare that sometimes ignorance is bliss.
