The new trailer for Tsai Ming-liang's Stray Dogs debuts today on FilmLinc.
The film, which previously screened at the 51st New York Film Festival last fall as well as the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, depicts a father struggling to provide for his two children and maintain basic living necessities on the fringes of modern-day Taipei.
Malaysian-born Tsai Ming-liang exemplifies his wide spectrum of visual flair into the picture, resulting in the combination of the stylistic and the naturalistic (separately demonstrated in his eclectic filmography with such works as The Wayward Cloud and Goodbye Dragon Inn). As Tony Rayns of Film Comment describes it, “Most of its scenes are single shots, and there’s no causal link between one and the next. Some shots are so realist that they could have been taken with a hidden camera. Others are so stylized that they might well represent dreams.”
Since its festival run, Stray Dogs has received much acclaim from critics across the globe, in addition to receiving the Grand Special Jury Prize in Venice. Andrew Schenker of Slant called the film a “masterpiece,” while Time Out New York’s David Ehrlich describes it to “rank with the best work this inimitable, essential artist has done.”
The trailer gives moviegoers a preview of the bleak, surreal world Stray Dogs inhabits, leaving much to the imagination as only traces of the plot are present. Atmosphere and setting are on display here, which are just enough to draw viewers into the hypnotic nature of the film. As Scott Tobias at The Dissolve puts it, “never has Tsai addressed poverty as directly and emotionally as he does in Stray Dogs, and the choice to do so now, after many more distanced treatments of alienation in Taipei, is especially bracing.”
The film will open for its theatrical run at the Film Society on September 12.
