ILLUMINATE Film Festival features year-round screenings of conscious films and programs to keep your consciousness expanded throughout the year.
HEART OF A DOG, a film by Laurie Anderson is presented by Sedona International Film Festival in partnership with ILLUMINATE at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre, in Sedona, Arizona on December 11-17, 2015.
HEART OF A DOG is shortlisted for the 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for the upcoming Oscars. It is one of the top 15 documentaries of the year vying for one of the five nominations and going for the coveted gold statue.
Centering on Anderson’s beloved rat terrier Lolabelle, who died in 2011, HEART OF A DOG is a personal essay that weaves together childhood memories, video diaries, philosophical musings on data collection, surveillance culture and the Buddhist conception of the afterlife, and heartfelt tributes to the artists, writers, musicians and thinkers who inspire her.
Fusing her own witty, inquisitive narration with original violin compositions, hand-drawn animation, 8mm home movies and artwork culled from exhibitions past and present, Anderson creates a hypnotic, collage-like visual language out of the raw materials of her life and art, examining how stories are constructed and told — and how we use them to make sense of our lives.
Throughout HEART OF A DOG there are quotes, images and stories from other writers and artists, including Anderson’s late friend the sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark, the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Søren Kierkegaard, and author David Foster Wallace, whose evocative line “Every love story is a ghost story” was an initial working title for the film. Anderson’s late husband Lou Reed — to whom she dedicates HEART OF A DOG — provides a coda to the film with his song “Turning Time Around,” which plays over the closing credits.
Critics and audiences are raving about HEART OF A DOG:
“A celebration! One of the most invigorating and alive films of the year!” — RogerEbert.com
“Magical! One of the best films of 2015!” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Spellbinding! Smart, silly, sad and relentlessly honest! One of the most moving and provocative films you’ll see this year!” — New York Magazine
“Dreamy, drifty and altogether lovely! Wildly inventive! Philosophically astute and emotionally charged.” — The New York Times