Shooting Scenarios: Stray

Shooting Scenarios is a column that takes a single scene and breaks it down cinematographically, looking at the shooting logistics, creative challenges, and camera gear deployed.

Istanbul has a special relationship with their street dogs. It’s not merely tolerance; it’s collective care. Elizabeth Lo discovered this after the death of her childhood pet prompted her to examine how cultures around the world act towards the canine creatures with whom mankind has evolved. Thus was born Stray, a feature documentary that gets inside the life of one dog in particular, Zeytin, and shows how full of agency and rich with encounters her life is.

Several weeks into production, the Hong Kong–born, Los Angeles–based director/cinematographer was returning from dinner and ran into her leading dog. She decided to run back to the hostel, grab her gear, and set out solo, unaccompanied by a producer/soundperson. The result from this hour-long meander was a seven-minute sequence full of canine drama. It captures two explosive dog fights, a protective barking jag, meaty treasures in the trash, treats from a young stranger, and a happy reunion with the homeless Syrian refugees who had befriended Zeytin and her dog pal Nazar.

These moments are captured in long uncut shots, mostly from a dog’s eye perspective. “I wanted the film to literally challenge the ways of seeing,” Lo explains. “When you’re at a dog’s point of view the entire time, that does something to audiences on a subconscious level. You’re being forced to embrace a vision that you’re not used to. One of the goals of the film was to recenter the world away from an anthropocentric mode of seeing. Anthropocentrism and putting humans at the center of all our narratives is so destructive. So the film in its cinematography was trying to move away from that.” […]

Published in Documentary magazine on March 3, 2021.