Director Eryn Wilson
Score 3/6

Profile of Jacob Leezak’s Canine Behaviour Expert Dog Psychology Centre, located in outer Sydney, a place where traumatised dogs and traumatised humans can heal one another.

Dogs. People like Dogs and people have strong feelings about traumatised and neglected dogs. So, it won’t surprise me if a lot of people go to see this at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival.
I am completely unfamiliar with director Eryn Wilson’s work. I thought that it was a bold, perhaps even a confronting move by Wilson to start things off with the point about the number of dogs that are euthanised in Australia every day. It was good to see that A Dog’s Best Friend did not fall into the trap of becoming something that was overly confrontational or judgemental. I also thought that Jacob Leezak had a great presence in front of the camera.
That being said, I am finding that I’m conflicted over what to think about this, because even though this is a watchable documentary that is entirely capable of giving you the warm and fuzzy feelings, my first thought when the credits started to roll was ‘what was the point of that?’ I would have liked to have felt that I learnt something that would either stay with me or resurface at some point later. As documentaries go A Dog’s Best Friend seemed to be superficial at best and considering that this was just a profile of Leezak’s centre I started watching this expecting a little more then what was actually given.