A dog that needs to fly, with the voice of Frans Bromet. Johannes Hogebrink likes documentaries that make you scratch behind the ear

What made me curious about The flying dog by Johannes Hogebrink? That curious documentary that has its Picl premiere just before the reopening of the cinemas and is another quick tip for home viewers. Maybe it intrigues me because it's such a wacky idea that turns out to be a timeless metaphor at the same time. Teaching a dog to fly with a delta-glider. Sort of the way you find videos on YouTube of dogs surfing or driving cars. But a flying dog didn't exist yet, according to its creator.

His adopted stray dog from Bosnia should follow in the footsteps of his heroes like flying pioneer Otto Lilienthal and Russian space dog Laika. At the same time, I myself think of the myth of Icarus. And then when, by way of contrast, it is Frans Bromet who gives the little dog Chayka his voice, well, I want to see it.

In doing so, I do want to know why Hogebrink loves not only dogs and flies but also, as I read somewhere, making weird movies. His Russian girlfriend Paulina calls him a romantic. Johannes doesn't deny it.

Unexpected entry is all that The flying dog launches not with dogs or delta-gliders, but with mysterious animation. 'Everything starts with an escape,' the opening text reads. 'As the bird escapes from its nest, the chick from the egg, the egg from the mother, so the universe escapes like something out of nothing.'

Escape

So, what does Hogebrink want to escape from?

"Good question," he ponders when I call him. "I think it's an escape from conventional existence. House, tree, job and paying taxes, things I have no talent for. At the same time, there is a philosophical side to it. Life as an escape from chaos. Living matter is something that organises itself, reproduces and grows. It is a kind of primal urge. Escape from your nest, your parents, your past. That's also where the desire to fly comes from."

But then, as the film shows quite amusingly, yet another chaos lurks. Chayka turns out to be afraid of heights. It even requires a dog whisperer. The producer frowns and when there in the Austrian Alps the press comes to watch, disaster threatens. Or does it? Where will Hogebril's stubbornness lead? It turns out to be less predictable than expected. And do we really see what we see?

"Well, you can't really escape the chaos, of course."

Take a job?

To which Hogebrink adds another very prosaic motivation.

"For me as an artist, I also saw it as a kind of stopgap to build a livelihood, a route to the financial security needed to get Paulina over. Simply put, if I make a name for myself with a nice film, there is a chance I can continue on that path. Otherwise, I might have to take a job. Of course, I have nothing against people with jobs, but I'm not very good at that myself," he says, laughing.

"It is indeed not the most obvious path to greater security. There are no guarantees either, but you have to do something in your life where your passion and talent lies. If you don't try that, you can regret it for life."

On the wrong foot

So making a weird film.

"I like films that catch the viewer off guard, or put a weird twist on a familiar genre. So that you have to scratch yourself behind the ear for a moment because you wonder 'what am I watching now?'

The equally poignant and absurd Enjoy Poverty Hogebrink cites a fine example. In it, visual artist Renzo Martens travels to Congo to advise the population to start exploiting their poverty.

"A brilliant film, in a way toe-curling because you don't really know what exactly it wants to say. For that very reason, a kind of mirror that forces you to think."

"My approach to The flying dog is that I have a reverse mockumentary wanted to make. So not something that looks real but is fake, but rather a film that looks fake but is real. That seemed like an interesting experiment with the documentary genre. Exploring the tension you always have with filmmaking. What best matches reality and what is the clearest in terms of story. That's the experimental film step I wanted to take. Fortunately, the Film Fund recognised that too."

Tricky financing

But the good will of Film Fund alone is not enough.

"It proved very difficult to get funding. I have been walking around with this dream project since 2011. But before you can apply to the Film Fund, you need a broadcaster to say 'yes'. Each time, the response was: a nice plan, but it does not address a socially urgent problem. The only one that initially showed interest was, funnily enough, the EO. Because it's about believing in the impossible, against my better judgment, I initially thought. But it wasn't."

"People thought it was a nice story that just needed a reference to the Bible somewhere. I thought about that for a long time and finally decided not to do it. Because either non-believing people will think it's actually about Jesus, or believing people will think I'm taking a Bible quote out of context."

"The first broadcaster who immediately said 'yes' was an Austrian broadcaster. So it became a Dutch-Austrian co-production."

Passion for docu

Johannes Hogebrink graduated from the Dutch Film Academy in 2010 with Devotion. A beautifully designed short documentary that gives intimate insight into how four completely different people live out their greatest passion. But before that and still today, he was and is also active as a visual artist with a wide repertoire, as seen on his website. Yet at the Film Academy, he chose documentary rather than fiction.

"I don't know exactly why," he explains after some thought, "but I've always been attracted to documentary. That it is about something that is real, while at the same time the film can stage or manipulate things in the editing. I found that interesting."

"See for example the films of Michael Moore, who does that openly. Or the Swedish film Surplus On consumer society. That is also a documentary but almost seems like a music video. Then you understand how you can be manipulated by television. Added to that: I find a lot of Dutch fiction pretty mediocre. We are a polder country, too many compromises, too many people who have an opinion. I have noticed that the unconventional side of an idea gets shaved off first."

The flying dog once the project was up and running, he was able to make it reasonably as he saw fit.

"Within the production constraints, six weeks of running time of which only the first and last with the crew, I was able to go my own way pretty much in terms of content. But to teach a dog everything I was planning, I would have needed at least three months and maybe two summers."

Self-portrait

This ticket to a wonderful career (Hogebrink laughs when he hears this), might we describe it as an art project that got out of hand? Perhaps a self-portrait?

"Ehhh, it was not my intention to make a self-portrait. I don't like ego documents. But I couldn't escape it. My crew also made that clear to me. 'Just admit it Johannes, this is just about you.' I did portray a kind of caricature of myself in the film."

"And an art project? Anything made to inspire or provoke people to think about something can be called art. But it is not meant to be a high art film. It is deliberately light-hearted. It can be a fun family film, nice to watch."

Now The flying dog finds its way to the public, Hogebrink has time to paint and photograph again. And there are plans for an animated film.

"I really like animation. It's just a fat lot of work, but so was that flying dog."