The Poodle Trainer

The short documentary that I watched was called The Poodle Trainer, which was about a woman named Irina Markova, who’s a world-class poodle trainer in the circus. The documentary showcased a lot of her immense talent with training poodles by showing many of her actual tricks being performed by her dogs (which were pretty crazy to watch, I’ll admit), but it also featured an elongated segment as the other half of the film Irina Markova talks about what her job really means to her. I found this short documentary to be very strange, as I think it’s a little weird to dress dogs up and make them do acrobatic tricks, but I was also very fascinated by it. This woman is so incredibly passionate about her job and it means everything to her. In “Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction”, Aufderheide states that are designed with the express goal of entertainment. The Poodle Trainer succeeded at that, capturing several fascinating shots of rare poodle tricks, which were purely entertaining to watch. Aufderheide also claims that most documentary filmmakers consider themselves to be storytellers, rather than journalists. In Vance Malone’s case, the filmmaker of The Poodle Trainer, he most likely thought the same thing as his short film came off as a story about a woman and her dogs, rather than a report on a woman and her dog, a story and a report being two very different things. The book states that documentaries are meant to capture a moment in the real world, and I think that The Poodle Trainer did an excellent job at portraying the personal side to Irina Markova’s story. There were a couple shots of her becoming very emotional over a past event in her life with losing her first dog and how much her job really means to her. Documentaries are meant to be real, they’re meant to tell real stories that involve real people, and that’s what The Poodle Trainer does. Even though the film is about a very strange occupation that not many people have, it still shows how everyone will eventually find that one thing that they’re so passionate about and it will make their lives feel complete. Before I watched this film I definitely thought it was going to be cheesy and humorous, just based off of the title, but it had a lot more depth to it than I expected.