crew is then picked off one by one. After the camera falls, it keeps running, and the film ends with the death of the fleeing sound recordist. Cast Benoît Poelvoorde as Ben Valérie Parent as Valerie Rémy Belvaux as Remy (Reporter) André Bonzel as Andre (Cameraman) Jean-Marc Chenut as Patrick (Sound Man #1) Alain Oppezzi as Franco (Sound Man #2) Vincent Tavier as Vincent (Sound Man #3) Production Man Bites Dog is shot in black and white on 16mm film and was produced on a shoe-string budget by four student filmmakers, led by director Rémy Belvaux. The film's writers, Belvaux, Poelvoorde and Bonzel, all appear in the film using their own first names: Poelvoorde as Ben, the killer; Belvaux as Rémy, the director; and Bonzel as André, the camera operator. The genesis of the idea came from shooting a documentary without any money. Man Bites Dog is rated NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "strong graphic violence". Although it is never shown or suggested in the film itself that Benoit kills a baby, the original poster features an image of a baby's pacifier with spattering blood coming from an unseen target at the end of Benoit's gun. For foreign release posters (not including the Region 4/Australian release), the baby's pacifier was changed to a set of dentures. In the R-rated version of the film that was made for the U.S. video audience (as NC-17 rated films were never allowed to be stocked at Blockbuster Video), the scenes where Ben and the crew work together to kill a young child are excised; the following scenes where Ben rapes a woman and the camera crew joins in are included but edited to have less nudity and gore. Release Theatrical release Man Bites Dog was screened at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival where it won the International Critics' Prize, the SACD award for Best Feature and the Special Award of the Youth for directors Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde. The film's controversial content and extreme violence was off-putting to some viewers, and resulted in the film being banned in Sweden. In 2003, the video was banned in Ireland. Reception Critical response On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Man Bites Dog holds an approval rating of 74%, based on 19 reviews, and an average rating of 7.4/10. Kenneth Turan from the Los Angeles Times highly praised the film upon its