Stray Dogs

Stray Dogs (郊遊, 2014) is a slow-cinema drama by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, and you can watch it online on iFILM. On the edge of Taipei, an alcoholic father and his two children live almost like the strays the whole story passes by.

By day the man (Lee Kang-sheng) stands at a junction as a human billboard, holding a property sign in the rain for small change. At night the family sleeps in abandoned ruins, brushes teeth in a public toilet and eats from plastic trays. There is barely a plot in the usual sense — instead, long, near-motionless shots in which exhaustion, tenderness and rage slowly gather. A chance encounter with a lonely supermarket clerk hints at another path, though the film refuses to promise it.

Tsai builds the movie out of takes that run five or ten minutes, where time moves as it does in real life, and the final shot lasts long enough that you start to feel the weight of the gaze yourself. It carried off the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. This is not background viewing — it asks for patience and pays it back. It suits anyone drawn to demanding art-house cinema. Stream Stray Dogs (2014) online on iFILM.