“Hello, little bonehead. I’ll love you forever.”

So begins Heart of a Dog, renowned multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson’s cinematic journey through love, death and language.

This lyrical and powerfully personal film reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, and her beloved rat terrier Lolabelle. Weaving together childhood memories, video diaries, musings on data collection, surveillance culture, the Buddhist conception of the afterlife and heartfelt tributes to the artists, writers, musicians and thinkers who inspire her, Anderson has made a wonderful film that is both playful and serious, and reverberates with a profound sense of loss.

Fusing her own witty, inquisitive narration with original violin compositions, hand-drawn animation, 8mm home movies and artwork culled from exhibitions past and present, Anderson creates a hypnotic, collage-like visual language out of the raw materials of her life and art, examining how stories are constructed and told - and how we use them to make sense of our lives.

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