Guan Hu is not a man of many words. Black Dog, which he directed and which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes this year, is the same. The story’s emotional centre is manifested in the silent exchanges between a man and his dog and the obliterating force of the Gobi desert landscape, where canines rule. “The film is built from silence,” Guan says, “the possibility of a mysterious channel of non-linguistic communication between humans and dogs.”
Among the undulating charcoal sand dunes, time feels like it has stopped. Wide shots capture humans and animals shuffling together across the desert looking like insects. They wander aimlessly through a ghost town that appears like a ruin from another time. Dogs appear everywhere, from the top of dunes to the town’s empty streets to the crevices of abandoned buildings. By placing humans and animals on an equal scale, Black Dog examines the “animality within humans”, Guan says.
“From the beginning, we decided on a principle of ‘non-interference’, an observational mode. We didn’t want to interfere with life as it is. Our perspective is that human fate is insignificant and small in the vastness of nature and the Gobi desert.”