Mondo Cane
Mondo Cane is a 1962 film from Italy, directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco E. Prosperi, running 108 minutes. reelscum files it under mondo.
- Year
- 1962 · 1960s films
- Country
- Italy
- Runtime
- 108 min
- Director
- Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, Franco E. Prosperi
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- known (23/100)
- Also known as
- A Dog's World · Mondo Cane No. 1 · A Dog's Life
Defined in the glossary: Mondo
The original. Oscar-nominated song, colonial gaze, half of it staged.
The film that named a genre and set its rotten template. A globe-trotting tour of real and staged customs, cruelties and deaths, narrated in tones of appalled fascination, and an international hit that even produced an Oscar-nominated song.
Much of it is faked and all of it is framed to make the foreign look grotesque, which is the colonial gaze in its purest commercial form. It matters here as the ancestor of the whole mondo line and, eventually, the cannibal cycle.
A historically important film that is also frequently indefensible.
Trailer
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Written about
- Mondo: the shockumentary, 1962 to 1978
An Oscar-nominated love ballad, a beach of dying sea turtles, a murder charge beaten before the film even opened, and a monkey brain made of cauliflower.
- The Italian cannibal cycle, 1977 to 1985
Eight years, a dozen films, one arrest, and a court appearance to prove the cast were still alive.
Filed alongside
Africa Addio
Not staged, which makes it far worse. A repellent document.
Faces of Death
Mostly fake, entirely cynical, and a rental-shop legend regardless.
Goodbye Uncle Tom
Jacopetti and Prosperi's slavery reconstruction, and the most indefensible thing the mondo pair ever shot.
Cannibal Holocaust
A serious film about media atrocity that committed real atrocity.