WHITE DOG

WHITE DOG

1968. America in a state of disarray, with an open front in Vietnam and faced at home with the "black question"; Paris in turmoil, revolted and burning. Roman Gary, already a successful writer, has left the diplomatic corps and is turning to cinema, directing films starring his wife Jeanne Schiberg, also at the height of her film career.
THE White Dog is based on real events. In Los Angeles, Gary picks up a lovable stray wolfdog off the street one day. But he quickly realizes that this is a dog with racist reflexes, a "white dog," like the dogs that were once trained in the South to hunt blacks, and that police forces across the country continued to train for the same purpose. Gary entrusts it in the hands of a fanatical black Muslim instructor, who is determined to "fix" it.
THE White Dog is a sharp, at times sardonic, contemporary allegory for 20th century political movements, ideological extremes and self-serving expediencies cloaked in altruism and social struggles. Interests, rivalries, speculation, manipulation, personal ambitions lurk around the young idealistic movie star Jeanne Schiberg, who supported the black activists as few as possible and finally paid for it with her life. The FBI and the CIA, Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, the Hollywood jet-set, Bob Kennedy and Marlon Brando, Andre Malraux and Norman Mailer, Gaullists and Sartreans are some of the persons who frame this masterful novel which, based on the case of a dog, talks about humanity and humanity.

The great French writer Romain Gary (Vilnius 1914 – Paris 1980), born Roman Kacew, first of all lived a fictional life himself: of Jewish origin living in Russia, he was a war hero, diplomat, polygrapher and multilingual novelist, the only writer in the history of French letters who managed to win the prestigious Goncourt prize twice, signing his books under various pseudonyms, notably as Émile Ajar. He committed suicide at the age of 66, a year after the unexplained death of Jeanne Schiberg at the age of 41.