Watch this adorable film about dogs at polling stations

One of the rare joys pro­vid­ed by the recent UK gen­er­al elec­tion was the return of #dogsat­pollingsta­tions, which saw pet own­ers once again share images of their democ­ra­cy-lov­ing pooches pos­ing out­side local vot­ing cen­tres. Intrigued by this most British of social media trends, film­mak­er, pro­gram­mer and LWLies con­trib­u­tor Ian Mant­gani hit the streets of Lon­don on June 8 armed with a 16mm Kodak cam­era to doc­u­ment this adorable cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non – and to explore the polit­i­cal sub­text therein…

“One of my great pas­sions is admir­ing cute dogs, and anoth­er is pol­i­tics, so the two seemed a nat­ur­al fit! The hash­tag is a fun social media phe­nom­e­non, but I thought it might be poignant to flesh it out into the motion pic­ture sphere – it occurred to me that tableaux of dogs, con­trast­ed with peo­ple talk­ing about their urgent views on pol­i­tics, might be an inter­est­ing med­i­ta­tive experience.

“I’ve got a bit of a his­to­ry of mak­ing films that involve polit­i­cal events, but show life car­ry­ing on at a ground-lev­el way: I’ve pre­vi­ous­ly made doc­u­men­taries of street scenes in Glas­gow on the day of the 2014 inde­pen­dence ref­er­en­dum, and about life in the city of Cleve­land dur­ing the week of the 2016 Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion that nom­i­nat­ed Don­ald Trump.

“One inter­est­ing part of the day was that we went all over Lon­don, includ­ing to Vaux­hall and to Jere­my Corbyn’s con­stituen­cy of Isling­ton North, but there were hard­ly any dogs at polling sta­tions except in leafy areas like Crouch End and High­gate, where there were essen­tial­ly dogs on tap. This affect­ed the social milieu of our vox pops, and it also reveals the #dogsat­pollingsta­tions phe­nom­e­non to have some ori­gins in touchy-feely, priv­i­leged mid­dle-class cul­ture. Make of that what you will, but I think it’s interesting.

“I’m quite hap­py with the film and feel that it does pro­vide that med­i­ta­tive feel­ing I was look­ing for. You look in these dogs’ eyes and won­der, what on earth could ​‘Brex­it’ mean to a dog? There’s also an unin­tend­ed sub­text in there that I only realised watch­ing it back: The dogs are wait­ing patient­ly for their mas­ters, and so are we, the voters.”

Fol­low Ian on Twit­ter @mant_a_tangi @sligofilm @badlandsfilm

LWLies 107: The Sin­ners issue – Out now!