A dog in the dock and another doing red carpet interviews: why has Cannes gone canine crazy?

Once a celebration of arthouse raunch, the film festival has had to change in the #MeToo era. Is that why, on screen and off, pooches are everywhere this year? Our writer goes walkies on the Côte d’Azur

One of the most eagerly anticipated talents about to grace the red carpet at Cannes this week is tall, blond, leggy and has a seductively husky voice. Par for the course, you might think, at the glitzy, notoriously libidinous film festival on the sun-kissed Côte d’Azur – were it not for that lolling tongue and the fact that the bag in the hands of the entourage is more likely to be a doggy-doo than a Birkin or Chanel.

Fawn-maned griffon cross Kodi is the star of French-Swiss actor Laetitia Dosch’s directorial debut Dog on Trial, a film that feels precision-engineered for Cannes’ 77th edition in more ways than one. Dosch tells me the following origin story about her first feature. Three years ago, while the script was taking shape inside her head, she bumped into the director Justine Triet on the train from Cannes to Paris.

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