Director Tony Jones in attendance + Q&A

A bracing and ethically charged work, Sentient sees Tony Jones move from political interrogation to something more elemental: the question of animal consciousness, and the systems that deny it.

Drawing on a growing body of scientific research into cognition, emotion, and sentience across species, Sentient dismantles the long-held assumption that animals exist outside the realm of meaningful experience. Jones threads together laboratory footage, expert testimony, and philosophical inquiry to expose the structures—industrial, scientific, and cultural—that continue to justify animal experimentation.

But this is no blunt instrument. Rather than polemic, Sentient places empirical evidence alongside the often-unseen realities of testing regimes. The result is a film that is as rigorous as it is confronting, asking audiences to reckon with the the space between what we now know and what we continue to permit.

Measured, unsettling, and morally insistent, Sentient reframes the debate — not as a fringe concern, but as a central ethical fault line of modernity.