Q&A: LEAP Student Grantee Daniel Blokh Remembers Laika the Space Dog
Yale College student Daniel Blokh ’24 YC is a writer, filmmaker, and recipient of a 2024 Student Grant from the Law, Environment & Animals Program (LEAP) at Yale Law School. With his grant, Blokh directed and produced "Looking Back with Laika,” a short documentary about the dog who became the first living creature in space. Through interviews with immigrants from the former Soviet Union now living in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, N.Y., Blokh sought to explore the wide range of feelings former Soviet citizens harbor toward Laika, from pride and patriotism to sadness and ethical uncertainty. Blokh discusses the film.
Who was Laika? Why did you feel compelled to document how she’s remembered?
Laika was the dog that the Soviet Union sent to space in 1957 and the first living creature that experienced the cosmos. This was done as part of the Space Race, the scientific competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. It was a landmark achievement in that regard. However, Laika did die in space. Initially it was reported that she died after a week or so, but more recently it was learned that she died after only a few hours in space. There was some malfunction in her equipment.
What interested me in the story is that, on the one hand, it's this patriotic achievement of the Soviet Union, a symbolic moment in this competition between countries and a landmark achievement for science on a global level. But it's also a very terrifying story about an animal who probably was extremely terrified and died a painful death. The contrast between these two things has always struck me.
Coming from a personal angle, I was particularly invested in this story because my family comes from Eastern Europe: my dad is from Ukraine, and my mom is from Russia. I was also a double major in Russian and comparative literature at Yale. For all of these reasons, I thought that it would be an interesting subject to explore.
In your film, you interviewed many people — mostly Eastern European immigrants to the U.S. — about their thoughts about Laika. What did you learn from these interviews?
It’s interesting: while making the film, I learned less about Laika and more about the people I interviewed, which was a bit expected. I approached this project knowing that it might become more about the Russian and Eastern European immigrants who I was interviewing: through sharing their thoughts about Laika, they would become the main characters.
One thing I learned was that asking straight-on about Laika was rarely a good approach. Often it would take talking to people about their dogs, their thoughts about dogs, but most importantly the dogs that they remembered from childhood back in Eastern Europe to open them up and make them comfortable. Through those conversations, they could arrive at a point of empathy with Laika. I think that entry point brought them from thinking about their dog — thinking “I loved my dog so much” — to thinking about Laika. It created space for some intense imaginative exercises where people were really envisioning what Laika felt when she was in space. I found that that approach ended up being much more fruitful than just asking people immediately if they remembered when Laika was sent into space and how they felt about it: that would often give me a pretty dry answer.
Honestly, I was surprised by how many people, when asked, that would say, “Well, it's sad, but we had to do it for science. It was necessary.” I suppose what I learned about Eastern European immigrants in the U.S. — maybe about people in general — is that the way you approach the question — approaching it from a detached objective perspective versus a personal perspective — changes the way people answer.
Folks shared a wide range of thoughts about Laika’s story as well as about dogs and other animals. Were there any conversations that particularly struck you?
Yes, there definitely were a few. For example, there's a scene where I’m interviewing two women on a bench, and one of them gets mad at the other and curses at her in Russian. She calls her “suka,” which is the Russian word for a female dog. But then she says, “I'd rather call a human ‘suka' than a dog.”
We talked to her for a while, and later in the interview the same woman said, “I like dogs more than people because a dog will never betray you. A human will. You'll do everything for a human, but they'll immediately turn their back on you. But a dog will be loyal to you forever.”
This was interesting because I got the sense while interviewing her that she was kind of a difficult person, even just through her interactions with other people in the Brighton Beach park where we were chatting, I got the sense that maybe she had some tensions with other people, that she had some enemies in this little old Russian-speaking community. It seemed like when she was saying that people will betray you, she was speaking from experience about personal relationships gone wrong. And I got the sense from that conversation as well as a few others, that for people who have lived especially hard lives — as many immigrants from the former Soviet Union have — dogs take on this symbolic significance as the peak of loyalty and goodness in a world that is often unforgiving and cruel. That feeling emerged in this conversation, in the contrast between the difficult personality of this woman and her pure adoration for dogs.
I heard this same sentiment echoed a few times. I interviewed an American man who lives in Brighton Beach who said, “The Russians love dogs more than they love people.” Maybe in general this is a stereotype about Eastern Europeans or Russians, that there's a cynicism and coldness in human relationships. It really struck me as remarkable to contrast that with the extreme, almost like puppy love that people have for dogs. I feel like that almost childlike attachment or approach to dogs is the way that people can preserve that kind of pure love as they become adults. With some of the older interviewees, you can really see them return to it: one woman talked about this little dog her family adopted when she was a kid, and then it became a huge dog and wore little sweaters. You can see in the film that her eyes light up as she’s speaking. You can feel that she's being transported back into her childhood.
Were there any interviews or scenes that you wished you could have included in the film?
Yeah, we spent a day in the non-Russian part of Brooklyn, around Maria Hernandez Park and that area because we thought it would be interesting to ask other people without an Eastern European background if they knew about Laika and what they thought about her. We got a lot of interesting interviews there. Something that emerged was how people either didn't know about Laika at all or they knew about her but didn't know she was a Soviet dog. They thought the U.S. had sent her into space. It was interesting to find out how few people knew about this because it was a big part of this mythology that I grew up with about dogs and the Soviet Union.
I ended up cutting all of those interviews except one, which was kind of comedic, where this guy is talking about how he doesn't really believe that NASA has gone to the moon. But generally, the other scenes we filmed there ended up being drier than the interviews with the older Russian people somehow; they were more focused, with more people sharing their thoughts on the morality of experimenting on animals without being so personal. Those interviews took away from the atmosphere of focusing on the Russian community in Brighton Beach, and I ended up cutting them so as not to dilute that atmosphere.
Did creating the film impact how you viewed Laika, other dogs, and/or the human-dog bond? If so, how?
As someone who's interested in in filmmaking, writing, and storytelling, making this film showed me that animals are potentially a fruitful device for storytelling because they bring out otherwise guarded, secret, or vulnerable parts of people. Talking about animals allowed people to talk about other kinds of experiences they’d had. In the film’s first interview, the interviewee talks about immigration through the lens of her dog being scared to go onto a plane; later, she talks about the dog that she went on walks with when she was undergoing treatment for cancer. Those are two huge life occurrences made accessible through animals, through dogs. It's made me see that talking about animals can be a fruitful vehicle for telling stories about humans and that animals can be an interesting mirror through which people can see parts of ourselves that we haven't seen before.
I just hope people can realize from this film the sorts of conversations that thinking and talking about dogs and animals can open up and maybe use that in their day-to-day lives.”
— Daniel Blokh ’24 YC
I think about Laika, too. I had an interesting moment with my cinematographer early in the project where we were interviewing people and asking these objective questions about the morality of experimenting on animals, and the answers just weren't very good. Then my cinematographer said, "I think you need to ask people to imagine themselves in Laika’s situation: you're just this little creature who has no clue about the immensity of the thing that you're involved in and then suddenly you find yourself in this completely unfamiliar world, never to return.” So I began to ask people that question, and I got some interesting answers.
But I also started to think about it myself and to experience the story on a more visceral level really imagining this scene — rather than the intellectual or ethical lens that I was viewing Laika’s story through before. I have a sense that even though this film is near completion, this story is something that I haven't finished thinking about and would like to further write about or do something with now that I have that image of Laika in my mind.
What are your hopes for the film? How can folks view it?
To the second question, the film is on YouTube only privately so far. But once I finish mixing it and color grading, I plan to send it to some film festivals as a short so that more people can see it. At the end of the day, I'm happy for it to just exist as a project on YouTube or Vimeo, if that means more people can see and engage with it. After maybe a round of trying to get it into festivals, depending on how that goes, I'll explore publicly releasing it.
In terms of what people get out of it, it would be cool for people to know about Laika's story and this Eastern European immigrant community. I have a rare ability to tap into it since I speak Russian and come from this background: I can engage with them. It's a little sad to me that most Americans can't speak Russian and therefore can't really interact with this unique micro-community that's formed in in New York. I hope that by watching this film, people will be encouraged to go to Brighton Beach and talk to some of these people, to imbibe some of that atmosphere that I found compelling.
I just hope people can realize from this film the sorts of conversations that thinking and talking about dogs and animals can open up and maybe use that in their day-to-day lives. Even just asking your family members, your parents, or people in your lives who you usually don't talk to about their first pet, their first dog really brings out a warm, different side of people. I hope people give that a try.
