Start the week with a film: ‘Black Dog' is a poignant tale of feral dogs and stray humans

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26-05-2025

Few have documented the impact of economic change on society as have Chinese directors. In the films of Wang Xiaoshuai (So Long, My Son) and Jia Zhangke (24 City), the brutal effects of breakneck growth are mostly deeply seen and felt in physical surroundings – villages, urban housing complexes, factories. It's fitting, then, that Jia Zhangke has a cameo in Guan Hu's Black Dog (2024).
Guan's film is set in the Chinese section of the Gobi Desert. Stunt rider Lang (Eddie Peng) is on his way back home after serving a prison sentence. The bus in which Lang is travelling flips over when a pack of stray dogs crosses its path – the first indication that Lang's fate will be tied up with canines.
Lang arrives to find his town undergoing a massive transformation. It has been earmarked for redevelopment in preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Many residents have already departed, leaving behind hollowed-out buildings and shuttered stores. The local zoo has very few animals left, among them a lazy tiger.
The town's authorities are more worried about the feral dogs running about. They promise that whoever captures the animals will get a reward and the title of honorary citizen. Lang signs up with a patrol team, only to find himself caring far too much for a black dog that has previously bitten him.
The dog is as skinny as Lang is lanky. A taciturn loner, Lang builds a bond with the dog while grappling with his own feelings of abandonment. Lang's solitude – a choice but also a consequence of being cut off from family and society – is relieved by the dog and Grape (Ton Liya), a dancer at a visiting circus.
Jia Zhangke plays Uncle Yao, the leader of the canine-capture team. Zhangke's presence in Black Dog is possibly a tribute to the manner in which he has used landscapes to document China's experiments with large-scale capitalism.
Black Dog bagged the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024. The movie is available in India on Prime Video.
Black Dog is grand in scope and intimate in treatment. The visual schema and superbly sketched characters give a vivid sense of what it means to lose your home to a top-down government policy, to be adrift in a sea of forced transformation.
Cinematographer Weizhe Gao captures both the town's crumbling architecture and the harshness of the surrounding desert. The extraordinary backdrops deserves to be seen on as large a screen as possible. The scenes involving the free-running dogs are remarkably filmed, matching Kornel Mundruczo's White God (2014).
The movie isn't just a visual treat. Without being heavy-handed or preachy, Guan Hu creates a poignant allegory of displacement, resilience and individual freedom. One of the most memorable montages, in which people line up to watch a solar eclipse and watch the Olympics opening ceremony, plays out to the classic Pink Floyd song Mother.
Eddie Peng brilliantly plays Lang, who has barely any dialogue and communicates his feelings through minimalistic gestures. After the film shoot was completed, Peng adopted the dog that starred alongside him, echoing Lang's love for a soul as lost and found as his own.
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