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THESSALONIKI 2021

Review: .Dog

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- Yianna Americanou’s feature debut is a coming-of-age drama with a touch of the thriller, featuring a cruel game between father and son and questioning family bonds

Review: .Dog
Dimitris Kitsos and Nicolakis Zegkinoglou in .Dog

"Losing all hope was freedom," states a graffiti on the wall under the rooftop where Dimitris and his best friend are hanging out. Both of them on the threshold of manhood, they share a room in an asylum home for orphans that will soon throw them into the adult world. In their situation, hope must be a survival tool. However, as the graffiti sentence suggests, losing it might be emancipating, too. In a way, Yianna Americanou’s feature debut .Dog, which just had its world premiere within the Meet the Neighbours competition of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, is precisely about that process of liberation, not pursued but eventually experienced and painful. 

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Dimitris (Dimitris Kitsos, convincing in his character’s innocence) hopes that once his father (Andreas Konstantinou, expressing repulsive primitivism) is released from prison, he will finally have a family. He nervously chases this hope and becomes utterly frustrated upon realising that his father has in fact been out for several months but did not care to look for him. When the two of them inevitably reunite, their developing relationship turns out to be abusive rather than supporting – behind his paternal urge to “educate” his son and catch up on lost time, the father is actually exploiting his son by trying to involve him as an “apprentice” in his suspicious affairs on the Turkish side of Nicosia, while failing his real apprenticeship in a car repair garage, whose owner’s family want to adopt Dimitris. In treating his son no better than the numerous dogs he is surrounded by and, more importantly, in failing to defend himself as a moral parental figure who deserves respect, the father gradually loses his son’s blind trust, provoking a logical outcome — the son finds himself forced to sanction his father’s sense of impunity and uncastrated instincts. 

Cypriot debutant Yianna Americanou, who also writes the scripts of her films, seems particularly interested in parent-child relationships ever since her most successful short Eleni’s Olives (2005), which depicts an intuitive mother-daughter connection against the backdrop of the Turkish invasion in Cyprus. .Dog, co-written with Peter Speyer (The Wooden Camera), seems to subtly imply that blood bonds are not always the ones one should stick to. Whether consciously or not, Americanou and Speyer construct a reverse parable of the returned prodigal father, one who fails in his parental role and thus forces his son to grow up and take up sole responsibility without hoping for family back up. The plot supposes a potential for deep insights into the psychology of the characters, but instead slips into situational peripeties with thriller elements, featuring a rather monotonous dynamic and predictable outcomes which eventually become tedious to watch. The pale photographic palette by Yorgos Giannelis (Small Crime [+see also:
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, Fish n’Chips [+see also:
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) and his skillful play with light bring nuances into the portrayal of Dimitris’ hesitation, yet this hardly compensates for the overall transparency of the narrative. 

.Dog was produced by Cyprus’ Filmblades and co-produced by Greece’s View Master Films, the Greek Film Center and Hellenic Public Broadcaster (ERT).

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