Queens filmmaker Collin Kornfeind’s new short doc, For The Dogs, turns a neighborhood showdown between dog owners and parents into something unexpectedly moving. For The Dogs, Meaningless Films, 2026 Here in Los Angeles, we don’t think much about park space. We have Griffith. We have Runyon. We have that weird strip of grass next to the car wash on Sunset that somebody’s golden retriever has unilaterally declared public land. Space, relative to the East Coast, is something we take for granted — which is exactly why For The Dogs, a short documentary arriving this spring from filmmaker Collin Kornfeind, hits differently for an Angeleno audience than it might for the New Yorkers living inside it. The film is set in Astoria, Queens, at a mixed-use basketball court and playground called Sean’s Place, where every morning between seven and nine, dog owners take over the empty courts to let their animals run off-leash before the kids and the ballplayers show up. It is, by any legal reading, not allowed. Fines exist. Neighbors complain. Reddit threads metastasize. And yet every single morning, the dogs come back, because the nearest actual dog park is a 25-minute walk away, and nobody with a job and a commute has an extra hour to donate to their terrier’s cardio. For The Dogs, Meaningless Films, 2026 For a city that lets its dogs sit at restaurant tables on Abbot Kinney, this might sound like a foreign problem. But the underlying tension — who gets to use shared space, and who decides — is universal enough to make you squirm a little, even from three thousand miles away. Kornfeind, a Hofstra grad currently based in Astoria, is not new to documentary work that finds friction in places most people walk right past. His last film, Please Rise, won a 2021 Edward R. Murrow Award for sports reporting at The Washington Post, examining the tangled politics of the national anthem at sporting events. He also picked up a 2023 Emmy for producing and editing Welcome to the NHL. But ask him whether he considers himself a political filmmaker and he’ll wave you off. “No, I just consider myself someone who asks ‘Why?’ a whole lot,” he says. “With political issues the answer to ‘why’ is usually multifaceted and people have strong opinions as to what is the right answer.” He pauses. “I want people to question their preconceived notions. I believe that if you can’t defend your convictions, then you don’t have them to begin with.” That instinct — resisting the binary, holding two contradictory sympathies at the same time — is what keeps For The Dogs from collapsing into a local news segment about poop on a playground slide. Kornfeind lets both sides talk. Dog owners explain the logistics of urban pet ownership with the weary precision of people who have done this math before. Parents describe what it’s like to bring a toddler to a park and find it claimed by animals. Nobody is the villain. Everybody is tired. For The Dogs, Meaningless Films, 2026 There is a restraint to the project that tracks with how Kornfeind talks about his own creative process. He’s candid about the hardest part of making anything: committing to the idea in the first place. “When I initially think of a concept or have a spark that excites me, often the excitement fades so I question whether the idea was good to begin with,” he says. “But if I find myself constantly thinking about a certain idea over the course of a few weeks or months, then I know I have to bring it into fruition. To make seen what was unseen.” He describes filmmaking the way a lot of independent filmmakers describe it when they’re being honest rather than performing: a message in a bottle. You throw it. You hope. Success is finishing the throw. The film has already caught some organic heat before its official release. After Astoria councilmember Tiffany Cabán, who appears in the documentary, posted the trailer on her Instagram story, someone flipped it over to Reddit, where it promptly caught fire. A published write-up got the same treatment. Kornfeind says he wishes he could claim credit for a PR strategy, but there wasn’t one. The topic, it turns out, was already a nerve. “People have strong opinions about this issue, and I don’t think they’ve realized how strongly they felt about it because it seems like a ubiquitous part of city life,” he says. “It’s almost like being in a relationship with someone and they point out something about your demeanor or tendencies that you’ve spent a lifetime not noticing.” For The Dogs, Meaningless Films, 2026 For the LA reader thinking about whether they could handle a dog in a city that dense, Kornfeind’s answer is simple and blunt. “Absolutely, but with caveats. Dogs absolutely need space to run around and be free and socialize, and major cities make it hard to come by. Be prepared to fully alter your life.” Then the sell: “I believe you’ll find no better feeling in the world than when you come home after a long day to an excited companion who can’t wait to see you and then curls up in your lap.” Then the kicker: “Also, stock up on poop bags and don’t be a prick about picking up after them.” That tonal swing — earnest to blunt to funny inside a single breath — is more or less the frequency of the whole film. It’s a documentary about infrastructure and budget shortfalls that somehow manages to be warm. It’s about a civic failure that produces, almost accidentally, a civic good: neighbors meeting each other at seven in the morning over a shared illegal act, building the kind of block-level community that cities are always claiming to want but never actually funding. For The Dogs, Meaningless Films, 2026 Worth noting: Kornfeind’s production company is called Meaningless Films. He started it as a teenager, “a punk rock cynicism inside of me, scoffing at the idea of ‘making art.’” It stuck because, as he got hired by bigger clients — the NHL, Google, CBS — he liked imagining someone in accounting trying to explain a check written to “Meaningless Films LLC” during a budget meeting. It gets a laugh every time the logo hits the screen. Not bad for a message in a bottle. For The Dogs premieres spring 2026. All of Kornfeind’s work can be found at meaninglessfilms.com. The post The Most Relatable Turf War You’ve Never Thought About appeared first on LA Weekly. ...read more read less