Football, left, and Chola in Los Reyes (Grasshopper Film)

To make a documentary focusing on the daily happenings of two homeless dogs implies an unpredictable work, featuring two animals with no previous training in front of a camera. However, this contemplative documentary takes risks in the pursuit of reality from the perspective of these dogs.

There is a lot of repetition here of two dogs asleep or running after a rolling tennis or soccer ball, though this is part of the bargain in the spirit of truthfulness that defines the film. Chola and Football, the two aforementioned subjects, live in a skateboarding park named Los Reyes (the kings) in Santiago. They rest for hours exposed to direct sunlight, except when it rains. Then they hide inside shelters.

They are the kings of the place, indeed. A dark chocolate Labrador, Chola is younger and robust and never afraid to run after motorcyclists. Football, a mixed breed, is cautious, older, sleeps for longer periods, and follows closely the activities of his partner. During the day, the park is populated by skateboarding teenagers who hang out and smoke joints. It’s a meeting place where they can escape momentarily from their worries and responsibilities, often associated with difficult relations with parents.

These teenagers are delaying the time to grown up as long as they can, and we hear their conversations in voice-overs while the camera keeps its focus on the dogs. They sound almost like distant echoes for the indifferent canines who mind their own business as skaters and dogs cohabit respectfully. You might suspect that there are more interactions than the directors wants to suggest, since someone has to feed the dogs. Is it a collective task executed by park users? These questions are never addressed.

The film follows its unlikely protagonists without transforming the documentary into something more entertaining or narrative driven. Chola and Football act like common dogs, lonelier and more independent than house pets. The filmmakers are more concerned in the pursuit of complex images, unexpected angles, and fragments of elusive beauty extracted from the ordinariness of the setting. (You could never imagine that a single park and two dogs could produce so many different images and angles.) The film is distinguished by its invasive camera, namely the abundant extreme close-ups that frame the dogs and different parts of their body, as well as the flies that bite them.

What directors Bettina Perut and Iván Osvonikoff have achieved is a hyper-reality gaze of a place filtered through inventive editing. Someday, the teenagers will have to leave the park and face adult life. The dogs, though, will remain there, maybe listening to similar conversations from new park visitors, but not forever. When flies bite one of the dogs, blood flows and the dog’s flesh seems perishable.

Los Reyes is a humanist mosaic of loneliness and abandonment, for humans and dogs alike.