Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Chinese drama Black Dog begins with a canine cascade — a stampede of strays that comes hurtling across a stretch of the Gobi Desert. The episode introduces Lang (Eddie Peng), a silent loner returning to his hometown from prison. The town is on the verge of demolition for planned renewal — the time is 2008, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics — and what remains is an ashen husk of a place, windblown, bleached to a mineral pallor and overrun by dogs, some supposedly dangerous, others simply abandoned. They are clearly akin to Lang himself, who comes to form a close, mutually suspicious relationship with a rangy greyhound.Director Guan Hu is one of the “Sixth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers, who started out in the early 1990s. He is a contemporary of the revered Jia Zhangke, who appears here as a local big shot, and whose own films (including Unknown Pleasures and A Touch of Sin) have mapped his nation’s social changes over decades. Similarly, clued-up Sinologists would no doubt be able to read Black Dog as a commentary on China’s specific socio-economic condition in 2008 and since.But beyond those meanings, Black Dog registers as an existential fable about isolation, redemption, the possibility of making connections against the odds. It is also a crime thriller and a dazzling piece of landscape cinema: Gao Weizhe’s widescreen photography brings a haunted quality to city corners, dilapidated interiors and swaths of desert, with echoes of Sergio Leone’s epic sweep.This hallucinatory film might appear to have bleakness as its keynote. But there is undeniable tenderness at play, even comedy, not least in the developing love-hate relationship between Lang and the dog. The latter is played by one Xin, whose quizzical snout and ever-mobile ears speak the volumes that the taciturn human prefers not to.★★★★★In UK cinemas from August 30
