Stray review: An urban study conducted by paw and nose

Dir: Elizabeth Lo. 18 cert, 72 mins

The city looks very different from a dog’s-eye point of view. Elizabeth Lo’s strikingly immersive documentary Stray follows the lives of Istanbul’s street dogs – a colourful tapestry of bone-chewing, play-fighting, and butt-sniffing. Its star, Zeytin, is a magnificent and noble mutt, with keen black eyes and a scrunched brow. She’s exactly the kind of dog you imagine Diogenes was thinking of when he said: “Human beings live artificially and hypocritically and would do well to study the dog” – his quotes are used as quasi-chapter titles, in an otherwise largely free-flowing and largely unstructured film.

But Lo’s film does much more than exploit our natural affections for the canine kind. Stray is its own kind of cartography – an urban study conducted by paw and nose. Turkish citizens protested after the government attempted to wipe out its stray dog population. It’s now illegal to euthanise or confine strays in the country. And, much like the stray cats that populated the 2016 documentary Kedi, these dogs have formed their own society, a city hidden within a city. Zeytin knows instinctively when to cross the road or where to find the best scraps of meat. She treats other dogs just as we treat strangers, vacillating constantly between suspicion and curiosity.

Lo followed Zeytin – alongside her four-legged co-stars, Nazar and Kartal – over the course of two years, earning the trust of her subjects. Her camera keeps close quarters, studying the dogs’s faces as they inquisitively sniff the air. Zeytin guides Lo to familiar places – cafes, beaches, and building sites – but points her towards smaller, less obvious details.

We hear small snippets of conversation, like a group of friends dissecting their respective love lives, or a jealous boyfriend berating his partner. At one point, the sounds a TV filter through, as a newscaster discusses the expansion of President Erdogan’s powers. Later on, the dogs wander through a feminist protest.

Stray not only shows us what others might miss, but what they choose to ignore. Zeytin falls in with a group of homeless teens, Syrian refugees who have been lost in the system, now treated like ghosts in the only place they can now call home. They develop a strange kinship with the dogs, since they’re all searching for same basic necessities – some food, a little warmth, and a place to rest their head. They take a young puppy, Kartal, away from its mother. At first, it seems like a cruel thing to do, but it’s soon clear just how desperate they are to nurture and connect with another living being.