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What Is Hu Guan's Black Dog About? All About The Chinese Film That Won Un Certain Regard At Cannes 2024
The awards for the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival's Official Competition will be given out on May 25 evening.
Chinese director Hu Guan’s Black Dog (Gou Zhen) took home the top Cannes Un Certain Regard Prize on Friday evening (May 24). In the second-most prestigious competitive part of the Cannes Film Festival 2024, the movie defeated 17 other entries to win first place. The Jury Prize in the category went to The Story Of Souleymane.
Jury president Xavier Dolan (I Killed My Mother, Mommy) praised the film for “its breathtaking poetry, its imagination, its precision [and] its masterful direction.” Here’s everything you need to know about the Chinese film and other awards at the festival.
What is the story of Hu Guan's Black Dog?
Set on the edge of the Gobi desert in Northwest China, the story revolves around Lang, a former stunt motorcyclist and a local celebrity of sorts, who comes home following a stint in prison. He takes a local government job ridding a town of stray dogs in time for the Olympic Games, as per the government mandate. However, he unexpectedly bonds with an equally world-weary black dog, and the two of them set out on a new adventure.
Premiered on May 18 at the festival, the film centers around a very endearing mutt and blends elements of western, film noir, and oddball comedy. The greyhound dog featured in the Black Dog film was awarded the second prize at the juried Palm Dog awards, which recognized the best performances by canines across all categories of the Cannes line-up this year.
What inspired Hu Guan to make Black Dog?
As per the official website of Festival De Cannes, Guan, who has been living in China for as long as he can remember and more, has witnessed the country’s “tremendous” development over the past decades and experienced it first hand. What was the most curious to him was “what life has been like for people in places outside the big cities and in more remote parts of China during this rapid period of development.”
Guan thinks that there must be numerous people who have been “left behind or cast aside” in the process which makes him wonder “ what kind of strength keeps them going and helps them survive.” He said, “My interest in and reflections on these groups of people are what inspired me to work on this film.”
“Because this film focuses on the lives of a particular group of people undergoing huge social changes, the idea was to capture ‘those people’ in the film,” he said.
Black Dog lead Eddie Pang had to go through a massive transformation
Because the film is set in the vast Western China and the Gobi Desert rather than the trendy urban cities, as per Huan, the film demanded actors who could blend most naturally among the locals. Eddie Pang, who plays the lead role of Lang, was quite the opposite of the character. He is “tall and handsome and has a strong fashion sense” with a background in gymnastics so, “we had to change his physique, skin tone and facial features, removing the urban vibe he exudes from within and without,” said Huan. “At the same time, we had to subtly reveal the desire and dignity inside him that is hard to suppress.”
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