FRED’s Angelo Acerbi interviews Laurie Anderson, who presented her film HEART OF A DOG in competition at the 72nd Venice Film Festival.
Using the story of her dog Lolabelle, Laurie Anderson unravels on screen her philosophy of life. “I did not know I had one, actually” she told us. But here it is. And the way she tells it is so beautiful, as it is listening her telling us how this movie came to life
HEART OF A DOG:Heart of a Dog is a personal essay film that explores themes of love, death and language. The director’s voice is a constant presence as stories of her dog Lolabelle, her mother, childhood fantasies, political and philosophical theories unfurl in a seamless song like stream. The visual language spans animation, eight millimeter films from the artist’s childhood, layered imagery and high speed text animation.
The director’s signature music runs throughout the film in works for solo violin, quartets, songs, and ambient electronics. The center of Heart of a Dog is a visual and poetic meditation on the bardo, the forty nine day period after death in which identity is shredded and the consciousness prepares to enter another life form.
A Story About A Story envisions her ordeal in the hospital when she broke her back as a child and how the story became her way to understand the relationship of real events, authority, and faulty memory on the creation of stories. Theories on sleep, imagination and disorientation are framed as questions about time and identity. Is it a pilgrimage? Which way do we go?
Alice Rohrwacher has been appointed President of the Caméra d’or Jury at Cannes 2025. Known for her poetic and visionary cinema, Rohrwacher will award the best first feature at the festival’s closing ceremony on May 24.