I Call Him Dog

Paul, a retiring man who keeps a distance between himself and everything outside, is left an unexpected inheritance by a relative who has died: a dog. The order he has carefully built comes apart at once, because the animal’s energy forces him out of the house, into conversation with people, and out of his habits. Along the way he meets Laura, and Paul slowly remembers what closeness, connection and living actually are. Reinier Smit’s Dutch production does not build the relation between animal and person as a rescue story; it shows an arrangement in which both sides have to get used to each other. Egbert Jan Weeber plays Paul and Jelka van Houten plays Laura. The film runs eighty-nine minutes and dates from 2026, making it one of the newest things in the catalogue.