News  ·  09 | 08 | 2019

Ground control to Major Dog

Cineasti del Presente - Space Dog

In the year in which media attention was focused on man's first step on the moon, Space Dogs by Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter is both an ode to those who preceded us on this journey and a cinematic experiment that opens up the possibility of another historical perspective. An archaic and mysterious voice introduces us to the legend of Laika, the most famous dog ever sent into orbit, launched by the Russians in 1957 after a tough training but never arrived on the moon: the story goes that Laika's body was exhumed, charred in the ship, recovered in the Antilles, but her ghost still wanders the streets of Moscow, taking the form of one of the city's many stray dogs.

Outside of all conventions, beyond the anthropocentric gaze, Space Dogs is the visionary work of those who, at the end of the story, try to rethink it by inventing new instalments. A film at a dog's level (and then that of a chimpanzee and then a turtle) which, after a lyrical incipit, plunges into a wild dimension, unhinging the spatial, narrative and ethical connotations to which we are accustomed. The shifting of the point of view, between the essential archive images of the past, the weight of the legend and the violence of the present, marks a new frontier to question not only our role as spectators, but also that as agents of progress. Claiming that another view is still possible.

Support the festival now with a donation