LA's first Dog Film Festival features howl-out-loud comedies and ruff, tough true stories

The event is sponsored by the Petco Foundation and 50 per cent of ticket sales go to animal welfare organisations.

Uggie, the late star of The Artist and winner of the 2011 Palm Dog prize at Cannes. The LA Dog Film Festival does not yet include full-length features. ((Getty Images))

This weekend, the city that’s home to both the American movie industry and Cesar Millan’s Dog Psychology Centre is melding movies and mutts for the first ever Los Angeles Dog Film Festival. On 5 June, dogs and their owners can attend two programmes of dog-based short films at the Crest Theatre in Westwood, which, according to the festival’s website, “illuminate ways that dogs and people touch each others’ lives.”

Many of the shorts to be shown are comedies, including two pre-YouTube pet-themed shorts by Merrill Markoe, a TV writer and author who created the celebrated “Stupid Pet Tricks” segment for David Letterman’s late-night talk-shows. She also wrote and directed 2002 animated film The Lewis Lectures, starring Jack Black as the voice of Lewis, a stay-at-home dog, as well as the live-action comedy short A Conversation with my Dogs.

Also on the festival schedule is the 1995 mystery classic The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold, written and directed by artist William Wegman, and performed by his Weimeraners Fay Ray, Battina, Crooky and Chundo.

For the arthouse crowd, there are at least two remarkable true stories of canine-human bonding: David and Goliath, a dramatisation of a true story about a German Shepherd and the Jewish resistance fighter who hides in his home while fleeing Nazi persecution; and the documentary A Boy and his Dog, about a British boy with a rare muscle condition who befriends a three-legged Anatolian Shepherd who lost a leg after being hit by a train.

The festival, created by pet lover and radio personality Tracie Hotchner, launched in New York in 2014 and is travelling to 12 US cities this year before returning to the Big Apple in October. The event is sponsored by the Petco Foundation and 50 per cent of the ticket sales go to animal welfare organisations.

Cat lovers can rest assured that they are not being discriminated against: LA will also host at least two cat-based film festivals this year, CatConLA in June and the LA Feline Film Festival in October, both of which feature screenings of popular cat-themed videos.