SXSW 2020: WE DON’T DESERVE DOGS is a beautifully-shot, globe-trotting look at our relationship with man’s best friend

With most of the world stuck at home under quarantine, dog owners are now spending more time than ever with their pets, which must act as a great balm during this ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Australia-born and now Brooklyn-based filmmakers Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker examine that intrinsic bond with man’s best friend in the stirring new documentary We Don’t Deserve Dogs, which was slated to premiere at this year’s SXSW film festival before it was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Shot over 13 months, the filmmakers travelled to 11 countries to document various stories of how dogs shape and influence our lives. From the well-loved street dogs of Chile to the deep bond between dogs and their owners in Uganda (where dogs were distributed to help villagers cope with PTSD from the atrocities of war), the film showcases the integral role dogs play in the lives of people all across the globe.

We Don’t Deserve Dogs was a natural evolution from Salleh and Tucker’s 2017 film, Barbeque, which similarly traced BBQ culture across the globe. “Matt and I both love dogs,” says Tucker enthusiastically from the couple’s apartment in Brooklyn. “We both grew up with dogs back in Australia, everyone has a dog there. But making our last film, Barbeque, we traveled the world, and similarly, everywhere else we went there would always be a dog. Every family gathering would have a dog watching on in the corner. We took notice of that, I think there’s a shot of a dog in just about every scene in that film. So it was a logical next choice for us.”

Working as a duo, (Salleh as director and cinematographer and Tucker as producer and sound recorder) the pair travel with a minimal amount of equipment that fits into two backpacks, allowing them to easily move from location to location and retain a sense of spontaneity in their filmmaking. “We’re sort of very lucky because it’s just the two of us making this film, so we have a lot of flexibility,” says Salleh. “One thing we wanted to do with this film was not plan it all out in advance, but sort of let the story take it where it goes. You start with broad research, talking to people from different communities around the world, and then a story would take our interest and then we would start working with local “fixers,” either filmmakers or journalists, we went to all sorts of people. We had a lot of flexibility to go to places.”

“And as we travelled we collected stories as we went, and then that helped inform what we needed next,” says Tucker. “We filmed a whole bunch of cities in a row, and then it was like, “OK, we need to get out of cities and into something rural.” We filmed a whole lot of men in a row, now we need to make sure we get some really great female stories. We looked at the picture as a whole and said, “What’s missing?”

“It’s like cooking up a big soup, you have to constantly add new flavours and change it and correct when you have a mistake,” adds Salleh.

The film moves from location and subject without any illustrative text, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks for themselves as each segment unfolds. According to Tucker, it was an editorial decision to allow the audience to focus on the individual stories rather than the particular countries they were shot in. “We very intentionally didn’t want to label where we’re at, so we don’t use lower thirds or any other graphics to say where we are,” she explains. “We intentionally wanted it to be a little vague, and let it be about the stories. It’s not constructed in the order it was shot. It is structured in an order where we feel like the themes of one story maybe contrast or compare with the following story. There’s the story of Beenish in Pakistan, who rescues her dog on the street despite it completely being completely against their religion, contrasted with Jorge in Chile who abandons a dog. We wanted to jump from different landscapes as well.”

“It was this constant redoing of the jigsaw puzzle until it all fell into place,” says Salleh.

Working with small DSLR cameras permitted Salleh to get down on the ground at the level of the dogs for striking close-ups, while portable stabilizers allowed for the sort of intricate tracking shots usually reserved for much larger productions. According to Saleh, it’s the sort of technological advancement in filmmaking that wouldn’t have been possible even two years ago. “I’m very passionate about what you can do with all this small equipment,” he says. “It’s a very natural thing to want to have all the big toys. For us, running around with all these tiny little cameras, it meant that we could get down to the level of the dogs. We could do these long 12-minute Children of Men tracking sequences, and it would literally just be us running. I think one of the ways we got such good shots in the film was just by patience. You would just sort of sit and wait because you really can’t make animals do anything that you want. It would almost just be chaos; you just sort of keep filming until the perfect shot happens.”

With the cancellation of SXSW and a number of other festivals later this year, it’s an uncertain time for the industry as a whole, yet Salleh and Tucker remain cautiously optimistic about what the future holds for their film. “In terms of how its general release will happen and how people will eventually be able to see it, it’s still early days,” says Salleh. “Being an independent film, you sort of go to festivals looking for a distributor. And those distributors are still really interested in the film, but everything’s slowed down. Everyone’s saying that all the [streaming sites] are probably looking for content, but they’re also figuring out how to work from home and all of that.”

“We’d love to do what we did with our previous film,” adds Tucker. “Barbecue premiered at SXSW, and then that film was picked up by Netflix. If we could do a big festival screening then get picked up by an international streaming company, then that would be ideal. But we’ll just have to wait and see.”

We Don’t Deserve Dogs was slated to premiere at this year’s SXSW film festival. For updates on the film follow Urtext Films on Twitter and Facebook.