Film Ecophilosophy and the Question of the Animal: Jacques Derrida’s Cat and Matteo Garrone’s Dogs

In contemporary Italian cinema, many films focus on the human/non-human relationship, both as an expression of an ecological ethics that radically opposes the idea of domination of humans over animals, and as a symbolic element in the search for our human identity and our place in the world. From the specific perspective that I identified in my previous works with the term, “film as ecophilosophy,” a perspective that considers film an effective medium for the expression of environmental philosophy, the essay will focus on the analysis of Matteo Garrone’s Dogman (2018) in order to show, in an open dialogue with the Derridian text, how film language offers new and effective tools for the expression of an ecocentric philosophy.