Dog Days: A Conversation with Halima Ouardiri
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Swiss-Moroccan filmmaker Halima Ouardiri’s short documentary Mutts is a captivating portrait of a shelter for stray dogs in Morocco, elegantly shot in a sunbaked color palette of rich golds and browns. The film, which makes its premiere on the Criterion Channel this week in a pairing with Kornél Mundruczó’s award-winning 2014 feature White God, combines vérité techniques with a more highly stylized visual approach. The result is both an observational exploration of its setting and a metaphor for the global refugee crisis. I was blown away by how the film managed to immerse me in this animal society—home to more than 750 strays, complete with its own rules, personalities, and hierarchies—and was curious about how Ouardiri pulled it off. So I reached out to her, and she told me about how she discovered and gained access to the shelter and what it was like to shoot in that strange environment.
To start off, could you introduce us to your background and your work?
I’m based in Montreal, but the two films I’ve made so far were shot in Morocco. Mokhtar, my first short, is a family drama in an indigenous Moroccan language called Tachelhit, and it’s about a young goat keeper who brings an injured baby owl home to his superstitious father, who sees the bird as a bad omen. The subject of my second short, Mutts, makes it look like I have a special sensitivity to the animal world in my work, but that’s not something I’ve really planned. What always drives me are stories that awaken a strong sense of injustice in me. But it’s also true that I’ve been super close to animals since I was a child. Maybe because their behaviors are predictable, I’ve always found them very reassuring. Human beings, on the other hand, can play tricks on you, even if you know them well.
How did you come to find out about this giant dog shelter in Mutts?
I saw a photo on the Facebook page of SARA Morocco, the biggest and oldest stray dog shelter in the southern part of the country, near Agadir. There were hundreds of dogs filling the frame of this picture, and they were all the same color. I had never seen anything like it. I found it very beautiful, and I wanted to film them.
Was it difficult to get permission to shoot there?
I knew Michèle Ausburger, the shelter’s founder, who used to be in charge of it as well as another shelter for cats. I had first gotten in touch with her in 2009, when I was looking for very social cats to appear in Mokhtar. We stayed in touch, and she also helped me many times to care for a few Moroccan strays, especially for Mimouna, a dog I adopted and brought back with me to Canada. Michèle does a lot to improve public health in Morocco by vaccinating and sterilizing the strays. She is an amazing resource for the country, and I hope one day everyone there will recognize her value. When I told her about Mutts, she gave me carte blanche.
How many days did you spend shooting there?
Five days on location, and we were there all day long. Once we stayed at night to film the dogs sleeping, which resulted in one of my favorite shots. There is no electricity in the shelter, and it’s in the middle of nowhere, so we could rely only on a few batteries to shoot, which we weren’t able to recharge, and that gave us a maximum of only two hours of footage per day. That’s not a lot. It felt a bit like shooting on film. So we had to always carefully plan the shots, which is not easy when you’re filming animals. But they have a routine, so we got used to it, and sometimes Anna [Cooley, the cinematographer] would just roll and quietly observe their movements in long takes.
I wanted the film to be grasped on various levels, and one of them is visual: it’s a study of movement and time. Long takes allow you to observe the movement of the dogs all around us without disturbing their routine, by simply placing the camera in specific places. Long takes also give a sense of time, and there is a lot of waiting—if the dogs are not eating or sleeping, they are waiting.
We aren’t given any context about the location at the beginning of the film. How did you arrive at that choice?
I wanted the viewer to be immersed in the pack of dogs, to experience what it’s like to be in a crowded shelter without being able to get out. The dogs don’t see where they are. They don’t know that there is so much green grass outside these walls.
Did you spend some time first observing the dog’s daily lives and rituals to decide what the best times to shoot would be?
The first day was mostly dedicated to observing their routine and getting used to being surrounded by hundreds of them. It’s a very powerful feeling to have them all looking at you, sniffing you, and barking at you! Even as a dog lover, I found it overwhelming at times. We had a group of the same dogs permanently moving around the shelter with us, which challenged the established hierarchy among them. One of them was particularly possessive of Anna and me. He growled the whole time we were shooting, but he was a nice guy, just very anxious and protective. He became the “bodyguard.” Then the next four days, we knew better what to expect, and we would shoot the same rituals again but from a different angle, including at mealtime. It was very pleasant to explore this space a little deeper every day.
And the light is so beautiful. Did you have specific times of day you wanted to shoot?
We didn’t really have the luxury to do that. We had to follow the dogs’ routine. But we were lucky because light is always so beautiful in Morocco. We also had such a beautiful color palette to work from; it was a dream. This old earthen farmhouse is the same color as the dogs; it’s as if they came from it. This is their land. Capturing the dogs’ beauty was one of the reasons I wanted to make this film. It was not long after I started thinking about the aesthetic that I stumbled across the diptych Dogs Fighting, by the hyper-realistic New York painter Dan Witz. It was exactly what I had in mind: the tones, the multitude, the ferocity.
Were there any specific challenges you faced while working with the dogs?
Dogs are very territorial. They urinate to mark their territory. So the shelter is divided into small territories, invisible to us humans but very well defined by the dogs. When we were moving around, stepping in different territories with the little group of dogs following us, it created some tension. We had to enforce some discipline and ask them to behave. A few were so scared of humans that they didn’t come close. That said, there were never any bad incidents during the five days of filming. The dogs were just following their natural instincts, and they were all very sweet. They all want to be loved by humans. And Anna and I loved them all, even if our tripod and our rubber boots were regularly sprayed with urine. No hard feelings because being greeted every morning of the shoot by 750 very happy dogs was a very strong feeling of both joy and apprehension. I’m fascinated by their ability to go from soft to harsh in a split second. Also, they are so curious about us humans, and they care about us. Going into the shelter was always done very slowly, without sudden movement, and we accepted this overflow of impetuosity from the dogs, who loved us a little more every day.
Tell us about getting that amazing aerial shot of the shelter.
The aerial shot is a drastic change in perspective from the rest of the film. From the beginning, the viewer is there with the dogs, very close to them, almost to the point of finding it oppressive. Then, finally, the viewer is put at a distance and is able to breathe again. It’s a bit like when you’re in front of the news, not too involved with what you’re seeing, sitting comfortably in front of the TV with a reporter commenting on a crisis. This aerial shot reproduces this language of news footage we are so used to seeing without caring. It’s our own indifferent look on the plight of refugees.
Did you always know the dogs would serve as a metaphor for the global refugee crisis?
This was a film made in a rush, but I did have a strong intuition about the metaphor, which I kept on exploring until the end of the creative process. After first seeing that picture of the dogs, I had an unpleasant feeling that made me feel helpless, just like I’m feeling today with the many crises happening everywhere in the world. I decided to start filming without too much research. I knew what interested me: it was the swarming, the pack of dogs in an enclosed space, the energy of despair—and that is what we filmed. We tried to show the perpetual movement of these dogs in confinement. There was something so absurd about this situation. The parallel with the crisis of human beings who are waiting in camps hoping for a decent life imposed itself onto the film.
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