The Dog Hill - A Summer in the Polish countryside for a shepherd.

Film review -The Dog Hill  This film will be repeated on Tuesday at 17:30 at the Capitole 2 Fellini This year as in every year, there are variety of films on offer at Visions du Réel. Some of them are big budget, some are shown with a lot of fanfare and publicity, some of the films are complex and deal with profound issues ie: elections in Iran, corruption in Africa, the use of pesticides on crops in South America. Others films are smaller ones and cover simple subjects and come to the festival with not as much pomp and ceremony, but are nevertheless are good films. The Dog Hill is one of them. It is a quiet and lovely film. Its main premise; a simple subject, the life and conversations of four shepherds working in the Polish countryside and filmed over a summer. They shear sheep, they smoke, they make cheese, the older ones give advice to the youngest shepherd amongst them, they argue amongst themselves, they make up. They hand out words of wisdom to each other, and what words of wisdom these are. When one of the shepherds tells another that his wife has been unfaithful but he is learning to forgive her, the other shepherd says “ You think you have forgotten but trust me you won’t, when another man has drunken another man’s soup you will never want to touch that soup again”. They continue on this vein with home spun homilies.There are some amusing moments and there is tenderness too, when one of them talks about the sadness he feels due to the recent death of his mother, the other shepherd is sympathetic. The cinematography in this film is simply beautiful, the soft colours of the surrounding nature, the earthy brown of the shepherds clothing, the white of the sheep’s coat, very few colours jar on the screen and we really feel and see the beauty of the Polish countryside. It’s a quiet film and a short one, just 39 minutes long, but every minute is sublime.