BLACK DOG

Lang (Eddie Peng) returns to his hometown of Chixia, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, on parole. Before his imprisonment for manslaughter, the former motorcycle stuntman was a local celebrity; now he finds a half-abandoned town where stray dogs rule the streets. Ahead of the Olympic Games, the town is to be cleaned up, and Lang takes a job with the dog-catching squad. There he encounters a black dog that submits to no one and that everyone considers dangerous – and between the two outsiders something grows that the rest of the town no longer offers. “Black Dog” by the Chinese director Guan Hu (China, 2024) begins as a piece of genre cinema and becomes a story of two creatures drawing closer.

Guan Hu films the people left behind by industrialisation in a landscape of dust and ruins. The film premiered at Cannes 2024 and won the top prize of the Un Certain Regard section. It was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2024, in the Chinese Night section.

Shown at the 2024 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

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