Directed by Elizabeth Lo.
The London Film Festival is the perfect place for a film that defies conventional releasing, and offers visibility to films that otherwise might not have landed on your radar.
As such, Elizabeth Lo’s explanation defying Stray offers one such film, the film itself follows Zeytin, a stray dog on the street of Istanbul, Turkey and the people he meets.
At the beginning we’re informed in titles that it is illegal to euthanise stray dogs and is one of the few countries with such a law, as such the streets are filled with roaming dogs, not vicious, more curious than anything else. Producing, directing, editing and filming, Lo follows Zeytin and other dogs around the streets in an unobtrusive way, the filming style is so matter of fact you image at any point Sir David Attenborough is going to start waxing lyrical about the nature of survival and a dogs instinct.
Instead, complimenting the beautiful naturalistic filming of Lo is a minimalist but humanising score by Ali Helnwein, it underlines the adventure of the dogs but also the tragedy, that while some people are kind to them, others are fearful. At one moment we hear a woman scold her dog for going too near to Zeytin as “it could kill you”, yet nothing we’ve seen suggests it’s in this dog’s nature, or any of the dogs in the film.
In fact, the most we see the dogs do is explore, play and on a couple of occasions have sex. This no-nonsense approach makes the film feel like it’s what would happen if Mike Leigh made Homeward Bound. It’s the cinematography that tells the story, staying on Zeytin and the dog’s levels, it meets their eyes and not the humans, as such most humans remain disembodied legs where voices echo from occasionally stooping to the dog – and the camera’s – level.
With it’s slender 72 minute runtime it’s hardly an epic of animal proportions, this is no dog March of the Penguins instead what we get is a slice-of-dog life that happens to have a profound effect on the viewer, it’s a film about life and the unfairness of it. It could have been a film about homeless people, the gulf between the haves and have nots, but maybe in using a dog instead it engages that strange part of the human mind that empathises with animals over our fellow man.
The film is not a narrative feature, and couldn’t quite be explained as documentary, instead this feels more like the dog version of Koyaanisqatsi, a sort of Caninenisqatsi if you will. Whatever it is, it’s a film filled with expression, and hope, and a film that makes you think that we share this world with animals, and we should treat them better. Good, dog, that’s a very good dog.
