Amid People

Poland1960documentary14'Pokaz specjalny (2018)

The short film is the only one of its kind as the protagonist is… a dog. The adventures the piebald mongrel are worthy of the thriller character. In the first scene, it witnesses the death of its fellow dog which has been run over by a speeding car. It others it barely escapes death itself – stoned by hooligans, given away to a medical research centre, and seized by dogcatchers. It lives a life of a vagrant rummaging rubbish bins for food. It finds temporary refuge in a yard of an old woman who looks after stray dogs, but soon it flees from there, too, for fear of human cruelty. Lost and lonely, it roves around city streets full of cars hurtling past. The four-legged character of the film which was originally entitled “The Vagrant” is almost a pitting image of the spotted dog in Charlie Chaplin’s “A Dog’s Life” (1918). Maria Oleksiewicz compared Slesicki’s film “The Dog” from “Cross of Valor” (1958) by Kazimierz Kutz . She wrote “The atmosphere in “Amid People”, especially in the scenes at the dogcatcher’s resembles Kafka’s “Penal Colony”. The film has a loose multithreaded construction, does not aim to make any points and is open-ended. Hence its multilayered character.” The film title suggests that the director meant the film as a metaphor of human relations. Above all, however, it is a testament of a tragic fate of stray dogs living in a “concrete jungle” of a big city. A small speckled dog had appeared a year before in a film Slesicki had made together with Kazimierz Karabasz titled “A Day Without a Sun” (1959). In 1963, “Amid People” won the East German International Friendship League Award at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.