Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog

Director: Yôichi Sai

2004 / 100min / 35mm

A fiction film made with a minute, documentary-like attention to process, this absorbing, unsentimental, lucidly told drama tells the life story of a yellow Labrador Retriever from his puppyhood, when he is earmarked for training as a guide dog for the blind, through the years of training required to prepare him for his métier, and into his life with his eventual owner, played by an initially wary and curmudgeonly, then gradually softening, Kaoru Kobayashi. “Exquisite… May be the family film of the year.”—Slant Magazine