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[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] “Guan Hu’s Black Dog: Olympic Ambition Meets Provincial Reality” by Oliver Farry

Guan Hu (director), Black Dog 狗阵, 2024. 110 min.

Guan Hu’s canine drama delineates a quixotic episode from Beijing’s buildup to the 2008 Olympics, rendered as a visually arresting thriller.

Lang (Eddie Peng), a former stunt motorcyclist released from prison after serving time for manslaughter, returns to his hometown in the Gobi Desert and signs up for what appears to be the only work available, the eradication of the town’s vast population of stray dogs. He soon encounters one of the hazards of life among strays: they attach themselves to you with alarming persistence. After initially attempting to discourage Xin, the dog of the title, from following him, Lang eventually relents, saves the animal, and later rescues a puppy the dog fathers.

The suggestion that such a remote desert town might have any meaningful connection to China’s hosting of the Olympics is probably part of the film’s point, a deliberate act of narrative compression that exposes how national spectacles project their logic onto places otherwise excluded from prosperity, visibility, or historical relevance.

^{Jia Zhangke}

The casting of Jia Zhangke as the chief dog catcher Uncle Yao is ingenious. Jia’s presence carries an intertextual weight that goes well beyond cameo novelty. Long associated with chronicling the social fallout of China’s accelerated modernisation, his appearance functions as a reminder of an earlier cinematic moment, one in which marginal lives and forgotten regions were treated with raw immediacy and local specificity. Jia himself hailing from the region, the role provokes a certain nostalgia for the period before his own films detoured into overly staid, transgenerational state-of-the-nation dramas. The nostalgia his casting evokes is therefore double edged. It gestures not only toward Jia’s own early work, but toward a broader era of Chinese cinema before many of its most incisive voices were channelled into more schematic, officially legible national narratives.

Eddie Peng reportedly developed such a bond with Xin that he went on to adopt the dog, a detail one sincerely hopes was not a piece of public relations embroidery slipped into the press package.

^{How to cite: Farry, Oliver. “Guan Hu’s Black Dog: Olympic Ambition Meets Provincial Reality.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 25 Dec. 2025, chajournal.com/2025/12/25/black-dog.}

Oliver Farry is from Sligo, Ireland. He works as a writer, journalist, translator and photographer. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New Republic, The Irish Times, Winter Papers, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and gorse, among other publications. Visit his website for more information. [All texts by Oliver Farry.] [Oliver Farry and chajournal.blog.]