Director: Adarsh Aryan
Running time: 9mins
It’s a common complaint of cinemagoers (at least it was when people still went to the cinema). You make the journey to the theatre, enticed by an amazing trailer, keen to see what more thrills and spills might await you in the extended run-time – and then you discover all the best bits are in the trailer. Adarsh Aryan’s nine-minute nature documentary A Landscape of Survival takes that experience to the nth degree.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you have virtually seen the film. Both feature a pack of stray dogs, wandering around in the outskirts of Ahmedabad, a city in India. Both feature gratuitous barking and howling at nothing in particular; shots of dogs with scars of past battles; and beautifully-framed sunsets. Neither one really has much more to it than that.
Considering the billing that Aryan’s piece gives itself from the outset, that’s not enough to justify a longer outing. Over the dawn chorus of various mutts yowling into the void, a title card declares:
Amidst this bustling urban landscape is the intersection of a natural world. Here, resides a pack of wild untamed canines surviving this topography.
But far from a story of a gang of neglected dogs eking out an existence on the peripheries of Indian society, Aryan’s camera never comes close to depicting the kind of struggle for survival we have been primed for. When they aren’t yapping at the sky, the dogs are pattering patiently up to strangers walking along the banks of the Sabarmati River, who are only too happy to toss them scraps from their own lunch. The pack are wandering across a wall where large amounts of what appears to be mashed potato have been left for them to polish off. Or they are drinking from dishes of water put out by unseen benefactors to make sure they stay nicely hydrated.
This isn’t to say I think the dogs are living the good life. Strays have an average life expectancy of less than half that of an indoor dog. They are prone to disease and predation – as well as being more vulnerable to cruelty from humans. Brief looks at some of these dogs speak to that harsh existence. One of the animals never far from Aryan’s lens is a male with a conspicuous hole in his ear; a survivor of an attack – possibly from a hostile rival, a leopard, or even a former owner. But it does not feel as if the director was ever committed enough to try and explore this further.
As the sun sets on the pack – once again howling at the heavens – and the credits role, it feels as though we only got a cursory glimpse of their world. And part of that boils down to the harsh reality of any filming project revolving around the natural world: like any form of gambling, it delivers exponentially more losses than wins. The nature photography which makes it onto our screens is the result of months, sometimes years, of work – including extended periods of unspeakable frustration, as professionals sit and wait for the animals to make an appearance; and then do something.
Aryan’s film, by comparison, feels as though he literally spent one day on the banks of the Sabarmati, and either ran out of time or got bored. There is not enough meat in his footage to reflect the hard life these dogs are enduring, or to hint at what it takes to survive in this place.
This is a student project, and so to an extent time was always going to be an issue that would prevent him spending enough time with the dogs for them to let their guards down, or to catch some other aspect of life around Ahmedabad reacting to them with hostility. At the same time, long-term nature shoots on a shoestring budget are extraordinarily difficult to manage. But it seems to me that even in those confines, there has not been enough time spent in the field filming to yield a decent amount of footage to edit down.
At the same time, even if he had spent weeks out there with the pack, and this is all he came away with, Aryan still needed to find a way to make this footage more compelling. To tell a story, or to present us with some kind of actionable information, or to at the very least give us insight into how any of this makes him feel. Even if that meant disrupting the beautiful ambience of nine minutes of baying hounds with a narration.
With a few tweaks, this project has real potential to reflect on both the harsh life of stray dogs, and explore an interesting duality of the humans around them – at times neglectful or abusive, at others caring and compassionate. Unfortunately, Adarsh Aryan does the absolute bare minimum with the subject, and his footage, meaning this is a missed opportunity.