Earlier this year I was asked to speak at an Architects for Peace event in Melbourne, where they screened Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Tasķafa: Stories of the Street (2013). This film, or ‘documentary essay’ as Zimmerman calls it, is loosely based on John Berger’s novel King: A Street Story. Zimmerman herself describes this book as ‘a story of hope, dreams, love and resistance, told from the perspective of a dog belonging to a community facing disappearance, even erasure’.

In contrast, in Taşkafa, she writes, ‘this voice is gifted to a wider network and range of perspectives: to dogs, a city and, finally, to history.’ It is most of all a film about redemption, tenderness, and the strays that occupy present-day bustling Istanbul. It touches on the sordid history of exile events that occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involving the mass deportation of dogs to isolated parts of the city. These have, as the film reveals, tainted hound-human relationships in Turkey ever since. And in some ways, we can understand the street dogs as being early victims of the modern Ottoman state; the Armenian genocide following shortly after.