A moving and poetic documentary set in New York following musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson reflecting on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother and her beloved dog.

Since the 1960s Laurie Anderson, one of the most famous modern American artists, has created a vast and celebrated multidisciplinary body of work. Across music, sculpture, drawing and performance, Heart of a Dog reflects several of her obsessions; her husband, Lou Reed, and her dog, Lolabelle, who sadly died one after another within the same year.

Seeking catharsis, Anderson combines animation, Super 8 home movies, collages and a great deal of music, from a string quartet to ambient electronica. Her own memories are drawn out through a deep engagement with Buddhist teachings, particularly the concept of bardo, a mysterious forty-nine-day period between death and reincarnation, embodying the permeability of identity and the mystery of transmission. The artist narrates this deeply personal project herself; it is a visual oddity that makes associations between disparate thoughts and images in a stream-of-consciousness mode that exposes the cognitive process and the genesis of thoughts. A singular cinematic essay and an evocative meditation on identity.