Cinema
Les Chiens errants
22 Dec 2022
The event is over
There is no story to tell. Hsiao-Kang is a good-for-nothing who carries advertising signs for a living. He smokes and pisses in the streets packed with vehicles.
The only people in his life are his two children. They eat together, brush their teeth together, wander about together. They have no water or electricity and sleep on the same mattress. The whole city has become a dumping ground for stray dogs and the river is far, very far away. One stormy evening, Hsiao-Kang decides to take his children for a trip on a punt.
"What this film describes is the elementary gesture of plebeian resistance, the endurance of outcasts who struggle day after day to maintain themselves in the realm of humanity (by providing at all costs for their children), thus transforming their existence into a manifesto, a challenge to the rules of the game of this society – the prosperity of some (those to whom the advertising for luxury apartments at exorbitant prices is addressed) at the price of the "fall" and rejection of others. The outcast here is not someone who attracts the compassion of those who are "at home" in society, but who embodies a life force that has taken refuge on the fringes of this society and its deathly powers."
Alain Brossat, Ici-et-ailleurs.org, 25 November 2018.
Tsai Ming-Liang, Stray Dogs. Taiwan, 2013, 138 min, DCP, colour, original version with French subtitles
With Lee Kang-Sheng, Lu Yi-Ching, Yang Kuei-Mei
Venice Film Festival 2013 – Grand Jury Prize
When
8pm - 10:30pm
Where
© JBA Production