There seems to be some confusion as to whether this documentary is called 'Taşkafa, Stories of the Street' or '... *from* the Street' - certainly the 2013 London Film Festival literature has the former. Anyway... it's the kind of film that rarely gets a cinema release, seeing the dark of the auditorium only at film festivals. It's about the stray dogs of a particular area in İstanbul and the people who live alongside them.
It is not, as the LFF claimed in best film snob pretentiousness, 'a powerful indictment of the impact of global politics and the economic appropriation of public space' - a few accounts of well-to-do incomers to the area closing their gates to the dogs excepted. Instead we get a series of vox pops with the local people describing how they feed the dogs and look after them when they are ill. The trouble, of course, is we only have the peoples' word for it. But it's certainly the case that most of the strays appear amazingly well-fed - indeed, some of them could probably stand to lose a few pounds!
Interspersed throughout the film are readings from John Berger's novel 'King', which tells the story of a community's disappearance, from a dog's perspective. These quotes are accompanied by the film being shot in slow-motion, in what I took to be the film-makers' idea of what a dog's vision is like. I wish they hadn't bothered; it's a conceit which spoils an otherwise charming, if obviously shoestring-budget, film.
