Some small-scale films stick in the mind far longer than huge and expensive spectaculars, and I fancy the Argentinian Bombon el Perro will be one of them.
Written and directed by Carlos Sorin, who has already made two prize-winning movies, it is set in Patagonia and stars a former car park attendant, Juan Villegas, who had never acted before, and a huge dog called Bombon with erectile difficulties and no Viagra to hand.
I can see this becoming almost as popular as The Story of the Weeping Camel, the Mongolian drama documentary that surprised everyone last year by playing in the UK for months. After all, we are a bit of a doggie nation, aren't we? And this canine has to be seen to be believed.
Villegas is given Bombon by a kind widow and, since he is unemployed in starkly poor Patagonia, he conceives a plan to put the dog in shows and breed from him.
He is aided in this by the dog breeder (another amateur, Walter Donado) who says that this is the way to a fortune. But Villegas is a kind-hearted cove who wouldn't do harm to anybody, especially the dog when he shows no inclination whatsoever to mount a female.
Without sentimentality and with plenty of gentle charm, Sorin pursues his story to its hopeful, but hardly feelgood, conclusion with a rare warmth and humanity.
This is not just a film about one poor man and his dog, but about the people of Patagonia themselves, fighting cheerfully to keep themselves in one piece, despite everything.
It is this sense of the social context that makes the film so memorable. It is small but perfectly formed. And Sorin has definitely discovered somebody new in Villegas, who is now recognised everywhere in Argentina as a star.
