While a documentary about a dog might leave many scratching their heads, Egyptian Adham El Sherif pulls it off beautifully, in the short film, "A Resident of the City."
Sherif came up with the seemingly whimsical idea when he was required to submit a documentary as a project at the Higher Cinema Institute in Cairo, where he studied cinema.
“I wanted my film to revolve around a character [whom] I can shoot the documentary about without the character’s awareness that I’m shooting,” Sherif said. “I wanted a character that was out of the ordinary.”
“I was once staying up late watching stray dogs from the balcony when it hit me that a dog will never be aware that I’m shooting it.”
Released in 2011, the film has gone on to win several awards, locally and internationally, including the Arnone-Bellavista award at Milano African Film Festival 2012 and the golden award at the National Center of Cinema in Egypt Festival 2013.
“At first, the institute’s board didn’t approve of the idea, saying that we won’t be able to take the needed shots to pull it off,” said Kawthar Younis, Sherif’s colleague. “But we took a massive number of shots until we had all the shots we needed.”
“Even though many people assumed that the film was a metaphor [for] the country’s conditions, that wasn’t true,” Younis recalled.
“The aim was to focus on the dog as any other character in the city,” Sherif affirmed.
The awards and nominations earned the short film wide popularity among cinema enthusiasts, but the it only became big among the masses when Sherif uploaded it to his Vimeo account.
And boy, are we sure glad that he did. Watch Sherif’s "A Resident of the City" below.