I was at the Melbourne Film Festival where for the first time in my experience you had to be searched by the police before entering the theatre - such was the controversy this film has caused.
The protesters outside had grievances with the content and claimed it was an animal 'snuff' film (naturally none of them had seen it and were going by the poor write up in the festival guide that did serve to sensationalise it). That is certainly wasn't. What it tried to do was portray a completely neutral balanced view of an event where three men decide to brutally kill a cat. What the film did well was not try to cast judgement on the characters and let them speak for themselves. And any one with half a brain could see that the pitiful excuse for this act - that it was name in the name of art and to show up the hypocrisy of people in terms of eating cows and not cats - was a cover for some very disturbed human beings with a terrible dark side.
Where the film failed was as a film - poorly shot, poorly edited and constructed. There was an overriding feeling that the film makers weren't sure of what they were doing and the film left you cold. The people in the film - especially Jesse Powers just seemed like people out to shock for the hell of it - it was not art in any way shape or form and I could not find any empathy with them.
Having said all this - there are millions of people dying needlessly around the world everyday. That a group of people in Melbourne wanted to protest a documentary film about the death of one cat (in admittedly heinous circumstances) just showed up the bourgeois nature of those who live in the comfortable west who can afford to waste time on such things.