Blondi: The Film Shot From Hitler's Dog's Back
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- Blondi, a short film about the dying days of the Third Reich, places the camera on the back of Lexie, a seven-month-old German shepherd, framing the entire picture between her ears as Hitler's last dog.
- Jack Salvadori (co-director, 29, from Italy) and Pablo Álvarez-Hornia (producer, 27, from Spain) met in Cannes six years ago and both studied directing in London; Álvarez-Hornia, who is allergic, said he was "happy to sacrifice a small bit of my health" to make the film.
- Peter Greenaway wrote the script, repurposing his own short story about Blondi after Salvadori — a self-described fan — approached him directly, while cinematographer Robert Richardson advised using an untrained real dog rather than a professional one: "just get a real dog that behaves like a real dog."
- The crew shot without permission, secretly redressing a hotel room and London's Senate House as 1940s offices of state, with actors warned in advance that screen time depended on whoever Lexie happened to look at — a constraint Salvadori said turned the set into something "almost like theatre."
- Nicola Pedrozzi was cast as Hitler after a long search for a German speaker who could "vibe with the dog"; he was found "halfway up a Swiss mountain" and, per the filmmakers, "everyone in the UK wants to play Hitler" but German actors refuse the role.
- The film premiered earlier this month at a cinema in Brixton, presented by Benedict Morrison, who runs the London comedy festival, with a behind-the-scenes documentary that played, per the piece, like "part caper, part descent-into-chaos."
- Salvadori and Álvarez-Hornia's next project is a full-length feature set in a colonial villa in South America, about a Nazi exile whose routine collapses when he "has to step into the jungle" — shot, Salvadori noted, more conventionally than Blondi.
Why it matters: Blondi is a formally audacious short — a 2024 answer to Murnau's 1924 subjective-camera experiment in The Last Laugh — that turns the Third Reich's last days into a sensory exercise in animal perspective rather than another Hitler biopic. For the filmmakers, the gamble paid off in festival placement and a feature greenlit off the back of it; for audiences, it reframes familiar bunker history through a creature that "has no conscience, no ideology, no capacity for any moral reckoning whatsoever," per Álvarez-Hornia.
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