The story of a friendship between a dog and a man against the backdrop of the mesmerizing Gobi Desert and a half-abandoned town in China won the top prize in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival 2024.
Former motorcycle stuntman Lang (Eddie Peng) returns home after eight years in detention. A local gangster won’t leave him in peace, and he needs money to leave his hometown. Uncle Yao (Jia Zhangke) helps Lang get a job in a stray dog capture squad, part of a big government campaign before the upcoming Olympics. There’s a reward for catching a particularly aggressive black dog suspected of having rabies, and Lang wants to try his luck. He catches the animal, but the dog bites him. The man and the dog have to spend a week in quarantine together, which radically changes their lives.
An intimate drama about a friendship between an animal and a human seems an unlikely choice for Guan Hu, director of the complex epic war film The Eight Hundred (an international box office hit of 2020), but in the context of his entire filmography it makes perfect sense. Working with different material, Guan Hu talks about losers and un-hero-like heroes (in The Eight Hundred it’s the deserters and peasants unprepared for the war) and shows that reality is made up of grim and ridiculous events. Along with a stray dog and an ex-convict, the outsiders of Black Dog include all the inhabitants of the city, whose lives are changing against their will in the era of China’s rapid modernization.
The film will be screened in Chinese with Russian subtitles.
Black Dog
Director: Guan Hu
China, 2024. 110 min. 18+
