“Dear friends. Did you know? The snow isn’t only falling here, but also on the lake of Novosibirisk, on a Lada in the Kamchatka, and on a whale in the Cara sea,” a woman shouts while wading through the snow between a couple of high-rises. Fedor is a locksmith and goes from one apartment to another. People can no longer find their keys in the dark or have lost them, and tend to vent their frustrations to Fedor, who hears them in silence. 

Sun Dog depicts Russia as a place of unbearable bleakness. The film is set in the Arctic city of Murmansk where, during the month of January, darkness sets in for a whole week. This “longest night”, the polar night, is the setting for Dorian Jespers’ graduation film: a theatrical, slightly bombastic and yet very intimate work. Not his first film to have been shot in snow-covered landscapes—he previously travelled through Kazakhstan to shoot Looking for Déni with filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev. But Sun Dog, fraught with poetic experiments, is remarkable. 

The camera hovers over the city under snow, guided by Fedor’s voiceover (who had remained out of frame thus far), commenting on what we see (“another train”), until it finally finds him, in bird's eye view, peeing on his own shoes and looking up at the camera. Jespers continually breaks the fourth wall: Fedor turns to the camera as if addressing the viewer directly. The deep, dark colour shades and the distortions of the image induce a sense of hallucination—think Requiem for a Dream or Enter the Void, a real trip.