You can learn a lot about who someone is by watching how they treat animals. In Stray, a sweeping documentary on street dogs in Istanbul from this year’s London Film Festival, director Elizabeth Lo certainly reveals a lot about how human beings treat ‘man’s best friend’ and also each other.
Turkey’s street dogs have been an ongoing issue for the country. Multiple attempts are made to eradicate their presence there in one way or another, but Lo’s Stray clearly treats these dogs, who certain people have seen as pests, with warmth, reverence, and empathy, even making the argument that they are embedded as a positive part of Turkish culture. Indeed, as a dog lover, the labyrinth of streets full of stray dogs, all with characters and personalities of their own, resembles a sort-of suburban heaven. You can’t help but be drawn into the everyday lives and antics of the dogs that we’re introduced to. You become invested in their futures and their journeys in the same way you would if the documentary was about humans or characters in a fiction.
The film centers around a stray named Zeytin, who is every bit the handsomely featured, brown-eyed, and wildly expressive leading actress you’d expect to carry a movie, just miles more lovable and cute. We see her going about her everyday life, enjoying what the streets of Istanbul have to offer, interacting with others of her kind as well as human beings that are strangers. Along her path, she crucially runs into a group of young lads who are refugees from Syria. They have an affinity for the dogs and often care for them.
Lo’s camerawork is key to this documentary, and it’s truly extraordinary how she’s managed to capture the intimate moments of Zeytin and the gang of street dogs she is often part of. A lot of the camera work is at ground level, which immediately humanizes the dogs, but also makes the whole film feel more intimate and focused; as if the camera itself has been accepted as part of the pack. It really cannot be understated how brilliant the coverage of the film’s animal subjects is here.
But it’s this personal, intimate point of view camera work that lets us tap into the empathy needed to understand Zeytin and to see things from her point of view. This ultimately allows us to experience, not just understand, the themes that Lo is consequently exploring. We see how a big problem with the street dogs is how they’re perceived, with people’s prejudices clouding objective judgment. Often the dogs are seen as pests – unwanted, feral, and diseased.
Through the exploration of how the dogs are treated, Lo does something truly clever, she draws comparisons and metaphors between the dogs and the human beings around them, ultimately commenting on how prejudice, class, and wealth affect how human beings are treated, particularly those that are homeless. When Lo draws attention to Turkey’s many attempts and failures to solve the wild street dog crisis, she is also addressing the glaring issue of human homelessness and how people have failed to eradicate that as well.
We are encouraged to see the positives of these crises through Lo’s capturing of tender moments between dogs and other dogs, as well as dogs and humans. We see the fundamentals that tie us together; our emotions, our feelings, our empathy, and our desire to help others are prevalent even in the less fortunate societies that litter the streets, animal and human. But she also highlights the need to do better, highlighting how people have protested to protect Turkey’s street dogs, but the Syrian refugees aren’t afforded the same protections.
Stray draws distinct parallels between street dogs like Zeytin and the Syrian refugees and opens us up, almost invites us, to see them as being treated in the same way, as unwanted outcasts of society, but makes great lengths to humanize them both and remind us that far too often we subconsciously, or even willingly, dehumanize other human beings. The film’s final moment, with Zeytin ‘singing’ (howling) along to a prayer song, is not only adorable but a poignant reminder that we can learn a lot from dogs; Zeytin almost wishing us to do so.
