(Photos by Ken Bennet. Reprinted with permission by WFU magazine, who commissioned the story.)

A man, a vision, a camera--Randy Benson

            Some say the true role of an artist is to bear witness to what the rest of us refuse to see. If this is so, Randy Benson fits the bill. His award-winning documentary, Man and Dog, has high-placed admirers -- it premiered at the DoubleTake International Film Festival and, among other awards, won best documentary at the 1999 Student Academy Awards held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Nevertheless, the film is difficult to watch.

 “About halfway through the film I lose about 30 percent of every audience,” he said recently. Benson wrote and directed the 15-minute animal control documentary in 1998 while a fourth-year student at the North Carolina School of the Arts School of Filmmaking.  Man and Dog is an uncomfortably close (DoubleTake magazine called it “visceral”) look at the life and work of an amicable, rural dogcatcher who describes himself as “the last human contact.” Benson’s camera follows a large, gentle man who patiently catches 30-40 dogs every week of the year -- and puts them all to sleep at week’s end. A voiceover of the dogcatcher’s musings makes his struggle audible: “I try to leave it...but it’s hard to sleep, to lay down at night and see 30-40 faces staring you back.... The killing’s starting to get to me.” A title card at the end of the film quietly informs the viewers that animal control officers put to sleep 7.5 million animals in 1998.

 “I interviewed a half-dozen animal control officers for the film, and without exception they loved dogs,” Benson says. “I didn’t make it to be an activist film. Here is a guy who does a hard job and goes home to play with his dogs and has a great relationship with his wife and daughter. There’s an amazing honor in that.”

Man and Dog has received dozens of public screenings (no small feat for an independent film), including on Bravo, an independent film network; public television stations in North Carolina and Chicago,  and independent film festivals in Spain, France and Bangladesh. As an animal control documentary, it  is also getting a lot of attention from folks who are deeply concerned about the issue.

Randy Benson sees his Wake Forest degree in Speech Communications as a natural step towards his studies at NCSA film school, where he produced eight short films. He is currently planning a series of documentaries on working class Americans. He is also researching and raising money for a documentary about an American political prisoner in South America.

There’s a freshness and sure-footed quality about Benson, who seems to possess both the drive and the patience to continue creating films, despite the obstacles of time, money and resources that mount high against an independent filmmaker.

 “For a film to be compelling, you don’t have to have a lot of explosions and high-budget special effects -- character and story are everything,” he said. “I want to create a body of work that is compelling, that moves people and offers my perspective on the world. There are so many stories to be told.”

Go to Greening Up  Although he couldn’t spell it at the age of 8, Harold Greeney, III, announced to his parents that he wanted to become a tropical entomologist.

Article on Randy Benson by Sheridan Hill.

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