Luke Holland

Gary Lee and his brother Mark run a large farm in the Sussex Downs, close to Ditchling. Until April 2005 Gary was also Master of the local Southdown and Eridge Hunt. Across Europe, farming faces a crisis and February 2005 marked the controversial end, throughout England, of hunting with hounds. Filmed over two years, this is a dramatic, first-person account of how one family struggles to cope with economic forces they barely comprehend and over which they have no control. Remarkable access to the invariably closed and wary hunting fraternity, offers an unusually frank account of the very traditional English sport of fox hunting.

'Going for the Kill' tells the inside story of Gary's final fox hunting season. We accompany Gary and his two sons, as they visit the kennels, where 84 hounds are prepared for the Autumn Season; we join him on an angry demonstration in Parliament Square, London, on the eve of a vital House of Commons vote to ban the hunt.

We follow Gary Lee through the farming calendar, planting, lambing, harvesting - and hunting. The film offers a graphic account of the hunt and asks whether the law is not too blunt an instrument with which to curtail a minority activity - one that features no more cruelty than is routinely encountered in modern farming. It also explores the idea that there is very little that is 'natural' about the English landscape, a landscape forged and fashioned by centuries of farming and hunting. The end of the fox hunt probably means that, at least for the rural fox, the game is also up. With no reason to maintain a fox population, farmers and gamekeepers have already started to wipe them out. The film is likely to provoke lively debate.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/ documentaries/storyville/luke_holland_interview.shtml