Black Dog

Lang comes out of prison and returns to his home town on the edge of the Gobi. The town is being emptied ahead of the Olympics, and the street dogs left behind are to be rounded up. Lang joins the team doing it. Then he meets a black dog and neither of them lets go. The subject is not the dog but the emptying of a place. Buildings come down, people move away, animals are collected; Lang is on the same list, because there is nothing of his own left where he has returned. The form rests on very little speech. Lang hardly talks; the narration proceeds through landscape, dust, wind and sound. The demolition scenes were shot in genuinely evacuated settlements. Guan Hu directs. The filmmaker Jia Zhangke appears in one of the roles. It won the top prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2024 and also took the festival's dog award. The animal playing the black dog was taken from a shelter and adopted by Eddie Peng after the shoot. Eddie Peng Yu-Yan plays Lang and Tong Liya the woman who arrives in the town. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet Chinese cinema built on landscape. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for talk and incident; the film narrates almost entirely through looking and movement.