Synopsis

The sad, compelling and sometimes bleakly funny tale of two young siblings in post-Taliban Kabul. Two children, Zahed and his sister Gol Ghotai, rescue a dog from a mob who are trying to kill it because they believe it belongs to their enemies. The children’s parents are in prison – the father for being in the Taliban and the mother, at his behest, for having remarried when she presumed him dead.

Essentially orphans, the children scavenge for food during the day and sleep in their mother’s cell at night. But when they are no longer allowed to stay there, they realise that a prison roof is better than no roof at all, and embark on a life of crime in an attempt to themselves be jailed.

Related Event

Stray Dogs will be followed by a screening of Kabul Cinema.

Full Description

Presenting post-war Kabul as a city of chaos, Marziyeh Meshkini’s film is an impressively visceral experience, a film that gives texture to the more schematic story contained within it. Here a couple of kids are reduced to orphan status when their mother’s imprisoned for ‘immoral’ behaviour, and the father locked up by the Americans because of his Taliban connections. Meshkini’s invoked neo-realism to suggest where her film is coming from, but not so much de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves; more his scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini’s theoretical texts – which contain more of an ethos than the pragmatic de Sica film.

Yet perhaps the film’s real strengths lie in a slightly magical or Manichean quality, as if the real world is ever so slightly off-kilter, more primitive and morally divided than we expect There is a fine early scene where the brother and sister rescue a dog from marauding kids who chase it down a hole. As the kids brandish burning sticks, Meshkini offers an overhead shot that captures well the sense of a witch hunt. With the kids insisting the dog must die because it’s American, and that the Americans have killed their fathers, the dog’s a symbol, but not just for the audience. This is a ‘scape-dog’ for whom the kids can take out all their anger and resentment. Meshkini films it in such a way that it’s a medieval image, and the director has invoked the Middle Ages when saying “the Taliban were the clearest embodiment of a medieval outlook in the modern world”. That the brother and sister save the dog, though, of course suggests good conquering evil, and it was understandable that the Time Out critic Geoff Andrew suggested that “the film was facile and manipulative in its use of children and animals” and consequently couldn’t succeed as anything more than a sentimental fable.

But is that true? In one scene we witness a large crowd gathered around a dog-fight shown so vividly that any sentimental manipulation of the loveable mutt meets its counterpoint in the wild dogs tearing apart each other’s throats. Throughout the kids are presented as charming wastrels, but on the edge of their story the film offers room for much harshness. After the boy goes to see his father to try and explain to him that their mother hasn’t been immoral – that she happened to remarry believing her husband was dead – he reports back to his sister. Zahed says that their father believes that their mother can go to hell – where she can make love to her late second husband. There is a sentimentality here constantly being offset by the brutality of the adult characters.

And also offset by the mise-en-scene, by the details Meshkini’s camera captures that might be found realities, but also suggest once again the magical or the unusual. Many of the Kabul homeless have made a makeshift life for themselves. One man lives in an old Volkswagen beetle that he’s so domesticated that he even has a TV in it. The strength of Meshkini’s film lies chiefly in its imagery, and its ability to suggest the medieval shot through with hints at the modern world - evident for example in that battered beetle at odds with the wastrels’ wanderings through a desolate land.

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