I went to the Zeitgeist last night to see 'Mine', a documentary chronicling the lives of five New Orleans families separated from their pets in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Okay, so put together a documentary about the devastation of an American city with the tale of lost pets trying to find their way home, and I guarantee you there won't be a dry eye in the house.
To be fair, there is nothing sappy or formulaic about fillmmaker
To set the stage for 'Mine', remember that millions of people evacuated their homes in the Gulf Coast during Katrina, and just about everybody thought that they would return in a couple of days to pick up the pieces. Many residents lacked the resources to evacuate with pets, and even those who might have managed to take their pets along with them would have been prohibited from bringing pets on evacuation buses or into shelters. So, I think it seems like a pretty reasonable alternative to leave a pet at home with a healthy supply of food and water until you can return in a day or two. What these pet owners couldn't have foreseen was the extent of the devastation or that they would be prevented by authorities from returning home for weeks. In the meantime, more than 50,000 animals were left to fend for themselves in a drowned city.
In the 2006 documentary 'Dark Water Rising', filmmaker Mike Shiley follows the animal rescue efforts of dozens of animal activists who descended on the city as first-responders to retrieve and shelter lost pets. Their challenge of rescuing the city's pets was daunting, and impossible really given their resources and the number of animals. Let's say that they did the best they could under the circumstances, moving thousands of pets out of danger and into shelters.
Except for the animals that had been abandoned or mistreated, just about all of these animals had a home before the storm with a family that now missed them. These rescue animals were sent off to live in shelters across the United States, making if extremely difficult for displaced owners to find them. Many of the animals eventually found their way into new adoptive homes with families intent on keeping them. Their good intentions created complicated issues about ownership once the pets were located by their original "owners".
'Mine' follows five pet owners as they attempt to reunite with displaced pets who have been taken in by new families around the country. Pezanoski usese the struggle for ownership to look at the issues race, class, and property rights that flow just beneath the surface each custody battle.
One of these owners is eighty-six year old Malvin Cavalier, a retired sheet metal mechanic, a widower, and self-described "full-blooded Creole." Cavalier is is always superbly dressed in a pressed suit with suspenders and a hat. His only companion since his wife's passing had been his best friend Bandit. Malvin and Bandit were separated during the storm, and his dog was eventually evacuated without his knowledge to a shelter up north. While we never meet Bandit's adoptive family in Pennsylvania, we do learn that somebody up there has decided that Malvin doesn't "deserve" to get Bandit back.
One of my favorite "Katrina movies", Kelly Reichardt's 'Wendy and Lucy', also uses animal ownership to raise questions about who is best suited to be a parent. Reichardt's fictional Wendy, like the real-life owners in ‘Mine’, spends the movie frantically searching for a missing dog, who she had left tied up outside a grocery store and was separated from against her will after being hauled out of the store by a police officer. While Wendy is being interrogated for shoplifting a can of dog food, a high-schooled-aged stock boy who witnessed her transgression flaunts his conservative values when he moralizes that Wendy shouldn't be allowed to have a dog at all if she can’t afford to take care of it.
A few of the adoptive families in 'Mine' may have the same attitude about being more capable and loving parents. In other words, the adoptive home can comfort itself in the belief that it is able to provide a better home for the pet than a poor black man in New Orleans. But one of 'Mine's' strengths is that it does not dwell on such issues of race and class. It features adoptive families with a range of attitudes about the best interests of the animals. We watch as some families selflessly provide foster homes until they can help reunite the pet with its missing owner. We see others flatly denying the original owners right to have the animal back. And then others struggle throughout the movie with understanding the right thing to do for themselves, the owners and the animal. It is these more contemplative cases that 'Mine' successfully draws the audience into a legitimate and moving moral dilemma: what do I do to care for an animal whether or not I can call it “mine”?
