Please Look After My Dog For Me
Please Look After My Dog For Me is a short film about late Bruce Taylor, who travelled through South Asia and apparently the Philippines in the early 80s.
I've been here that long, it's starting to feel like home. I'm living in the jungle, not far from the waves. The hassles to get here were definitely worth it.
Bruce's sister reads the words from a post card, four decades after he has passed in 1985. What follows is a collection of video clips, recorded with a Super 8 camera, post cards and recordings of Bruce's voice as he gives status updates on his travels.
On the recordings you see all the exciting adventures of a world traveller. The jungle, the surfing, the crazy traffic, the waterfalls, the volcanoes, the monkeys, the bats, the happy children, a feast of Lechon spread out on banana leaves, the works. You can tell he's been living the good life, exploring a world so foreign to him.
"I still miss him", goes his widow Gina, whom he had married while he was out there travelling the Philippines, as she's looking at old pictures and recordings together with Bruce's closer family. Happy people wave in the video. "Doesn't get much easier, does it?". "Please look after my dog for me", Bruce says in the end. And you sure know, he's not coming back.
More than anything this had me thinking about travelling in times before the internet. It's pretty exciting to be out there in the first place, but what a genuine adventure it must have been without social media, without "10 places you must see in place XYZ", without Google Maps, without smartphones, without the crowds.
One can only imagine.