Lahiri Dam Keeper

•Nearly 1 in 3 students (27.8%) report being bullied during the school year (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2013).

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty. ~Sicilian Proverb

Darkness

In the beginning of the film, Pig sees two kinds of darkness, the soot (physical darkness) and the town’s metaphorical darkness, or meanness. Because Pig takes care of the dam, he is covered in soot. This is one of the reasons people make fun of him. When Pig loses his only friend he wants to punish everyone for the world being so cruel to him so he brings pain to others by letting the town fill with soot. In the end of the film, Pig regains his friendship with Fox, and though Pig is still dirty, in his eyes the world had regained its light.

My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.

-Henry Ford

Dam Keeper

Lahiri Dam Keeper

Bullying

The Dam Keeper is a short film about a pig who takes care of his town by operating the dam to keep out soot, but gets bullied at school because he is always dirty. Throughout the film there are three main themes, friendship, bullying, and darkness.

Friendship

Pig is bullied by the other animals waiting for the bus, and their parents who are waiting with their kids don’t even attempt to stop it. While Pig is walking through the bus, the driver glares at him, the kids imitate him by snorting, and a girl puts her bag on the seat next to her to prevent pig from sitting there. During class, his books are thrown to the floor, and because of this, their teacher hits Pig on the head with a book.Hippo and Alligator ambush him and take him to the bathroom and throw his books in the toilet. After Pig befriends Fox he thinks he sees “Dirty Pig” on top of a picture of him drawn by Fox.

Pig did not have any friends before Fox came; on the contrary everyone bullied him. When Fox came they bonded over their mutual dislike for Hippo and Alligator. Pig loses his friendship with Fox when he thinks he found out that Fox was secretly making fun of by writing “Dirty Pig” on a piece of paper that he was showing to everyone. In the end of the film, after Pig saves the town, they mend their broken friendship because Pig found out that Fox had actually written “Dirty Pals, “ and the people he thought were laughing at him were in fact laughing with him.

"No one can make you

feel inferior without your

consent."

-Eleanor Roosevelt

The philosopher Aristotle said, “In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. They keep the young out of mischief; they comfort and aid the old in their weakness, and they incite those in the prime of life to noble deeds.”

According to a 2010 study done by the Regional Educational Laboratory of Northeast and Islands (REL-NEI), 40 percent of bullying incidents in schools go unreported.