The Dog opens with distressing footage of the bloodied male protagonist screaming in torture. The moment is brief and jarring. The film then drifts back three weeks, revealing a saner version of the man, MZ, as he drives slowly in his car. This character is portrayed by Swedish actor of Ugandan descent, Alexander Karim, brother to the producer-director Baker Karim. Set in contemporary Mombasa, a coastal city in Kenya, The Dog explores the journey of MZ as a member of the criminal underworld, capturing his allegiance to a ruthless female kingpin Saddam, his struggles with identity reclamation, his quest for freedom, and a harmful obsession with Kadzo, one of Saddam’s sex workers that he is assigned to drive around and protect.
The action drama film presents MZ as a local gangster trapped in the vicious circle of drug peddling, sex trafficking and related crimes. Often portrayed as assertive but contemplative and emotional, he is torn between his loyalty to the underworld and the desire for a new beginning. This loyalty is particularly tested after he meets and falls in love with Kadzo, with whom he hopes to escape from the city. However, the young woman betrays him, as he gets into trouble with Saddam and faces the music. The screenwriters of The Dog are Baker Karim, George Mungai and Victor Gatonye.
Karim decided to make a film in Kenya as his own way of rediscovering himself and reuniting with the continent. He had lived most of his adult life in Sweden despite being Ugandan. So, when it was time to make The Dog, he reached out to the production company, Zamoradi Production Company, which Gatonye was working with at the time. Baker had seen 40 Sticks, a film directed by Gatonye, and was impressed with his work. The third writer, Mungai, had also worked with Gatonye on a series, which made it easy to be a part of the team.
As a team, the screenwriters agreed to represent the issue of identity, a thematic staple in postcolonial African narratives and productions. They chose Mombasa as the setting because of its famous night life and its status as a tourist center in Kenya, which makes it a film-friendly and cultural environment. The choice of Mombasa also felt like a fresh departure from the capital city, Nairobi, where the majority of commercial filmmaking in the country takes place. Other alternative locations came up during the brainstorming and writing phases for The Dog, as the team kept on making changes that would suit the kind of world they wanted to represent.
“When we settled in the world of substance trade, drugs, nightlife, the one town that came out stronger than Nairobi was Mombasa, because it is known for that,” Gatonye says. “But we also felt we had produced so much work in Nairobi, and we thought one way of making the movie unique would be to do it in a place where we were all, in a way, foreign, which was Mombasa.”
There are indications in the film that the protagonist MZ has led a rough life prior to his working for Saddam. He has traveled around the world. Given the tattoos on his skin which stems from the French Legion, it is obvious he is a mercenary and has been involved in illegal warfare. The return to his hometown where he was born symbolizes a reconciliation with the roots where he longs for succour. But for men like MZ, the past is a boomerang and redemption, an alien. As Mombasa detracts from the quality of his life, it casts him into a world of fragile rules with damning consequences. The rules do not seem that hard to keep, though breaking them feels irresistibly liberating. At the beginning, when Papa, his colleague, warns against messing around with any of the ladies, you can tell that MZ has broken the rules. It is frustrating to discover that his Achilles heel is a Messiah complex that he refused to quell. If anything at all, the protagonist’s trajectory is a reminder that not everyone deserves to be saved. With a frustrated and conflicted character of this nature whose ambition is tied to a self-destructive gamble, the film speaks to the rashness and insouciance of many youths in society.
The role of Kadzo is portrayed by Catherine Muthoni. Both Kadzo and MZ are victims of their circumstances, even though the lady does not realize this. However, she is a little more hyper-aware and pragmatic in decision-making, basking for a while in the reverie of love and freedom that is beyond immediate reach but choosing survival in the emotionless, cutthroat world that guarantees it. “And in a sense,” Gatonye adds, “Kadzo becomes the trigger for MZ’s final journey, not because she asked for it, but because MZ’s idea of saving her is his own illusion of saving himself.”
More than its portrayal of violence and crime in a cosmopolitan environment, The Dog is part of the list of contemporary African crime drama productions, such as Loukman Ali’s Brotherhood, Editi Effiong’s The Black Book, Travis Taute and Daryne Joshua’s Unseen, and Shona Ferguson’s Kings of Jo’burg. Yet while its themes and style, like others, aim for global resonance, the film maintains local flavour and authenticity through the predominant use of Swahili, a widely spoken language in East Africa.
According to Gatonye, the goal is to maintain domestic and regional authenticity through deliberate creative choices in sound, preoccupations. However, this does not come easy: the storytellers had to resist the temptation to cater to Western audiences, especially since the film involved international collaborations and sponsors. The commitment to emotional and cultural honesty is crucial for ensuring the film resonates with audiences across the region, including those in Uganda and Tanzania. At the same time, the filmmakers took a global shot, prioritizing universal themes such as love and betrayal.
The Dog recently premiered at the NBO Film Festival in Kenya, which was held late October, where, Gatonye says, it raised moral questions about loyalty, about playing the unwanted saviour in people’s lives, and about the cost of violence. “We had a lot of people from the film industry, people from Mombasa, people who have worked in the nightlife scene—they came and watched and were really touched,” Gatonye’s reaction is sanguine. “Many said they saw themselves in the characters.”
In its abstract state, identity is fluid, malleable and susceptible to trends and transformations in society. This aligns with Gatonye’s view that a character like MZ, who is neither entirely heroic nor villainous, exists in a middle ground: a man striving to become what he cannot be. The African identity, then, takes on a more layered form, traipsing round pivotal historical moments, absorbing traditional, modern, colonial, postcolonial and digital influences. This complicated process of becoming is what The Dog stands for.
0 Comments
Add your own hot takes