“Inja” (Dog), a short film by South African-Australian director Steve Pasvolsky, about a relationship between a dog and two men–a white farmer and a black farmhand in South Africa. (The film won the award for Best Short Film at the American Academy Award in 2003.)
Worth the 17 minutes.
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Wow, wow, wow. This is a great little picture.
*SPOILER WARNING*
Really conveyed the complexity of cross-racial interactions under apartheid. Didn’t mind so much the use of the flags as a indicator of time either. (Interesting that the farmer raises the new flag too)
I thought it was a good deal of cinematic license that the ‘heart pills’ would have halted his cardiac arrest (or whatever fit it he was having), but it was a nifty device to show how if you sew hatred it can come back to you in ways you don’t expect.
Seems like Thembile shot the dog in my end. I think his love for the dog ceased long ago tho. Remember his whistle goes unheard. He was forced to withdraw his love in order to cope with what the farmer did to it as a puppy.
Where did you find this, Sean?
David,
The first time I watched it and sat up. Going, “wow.”
The other short films that got such a reaction out of me was Zim writer/filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga’s “Kare Kare Zvako” and the Joburg filmmaker Dean Blumberg’s “Black Sushi.”
I am trying to remember where I saw this first. I think it was on a BA or Virgin Airways flight to South Africa. SAA would never show this. They’d rather show some crappy British or American sitcom.
This time I found it through the website for Pangea Day: http://www.pangeaday.org/pangeadayFilms.php.
My friend Dara Kell’s film one an award for it.
I want to post one or two more films from that site.
Sean
Wow indeed. Pity these small gems don’t get the attention they deserve on mainstream film circuits or television screens (whether SAA or SABC).
The old themes of land, complex alliances/tensions/negotiations between black and white, landowners and labourers, the elites that can switch flags but the rest stays much the same, with the dog as symbol of the policing of those boundaries (some intertexts here with JM Coetzee’s Disgrace perhaps).
Great.
Herman, I agree with you that the dog “patrols the boundaries” of the new SA.
Would be interested to check out ‘Disgrace’ with Malkovich as David Lurie. It’s one of the most complex and morally ambiguous novels I have ever read, so I am not hopeful that the film will live up to those high standards. Still could make for a good watch.
Sean, thanks for the recommendations on the other shorties.