Taşkafa stories of the street (TAŞKAFA, BİR SOKAK HİKÂYESİ)

by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, text and voiced by John Berger

"A work as profound as it is protesting". (Sight & Sound Critic’s Choice, best films of 2013, Sukhdev Sandhu).

“Do not miss!” (Sabah newspaper; Istanbul Film Festival, 2013)

“A whisper of what we do to people” (Hackney Citizen, London Film Festival, October 2013)

"In other words, what is true of dogs and other animals – that some humans seek to exclude them from their lives for the sake of a ‘sanitised’ (bourgeois?) existence – seems also to be true of people". (WJRC Brown, Notes from the LFF)

“At once a genuinely singular portrait of a world city in transition, an affecting and committed study of those marginalized by globalization and an empathetic vision of resistance through a wholly different register of belonging, Taskafa is that rarest of breeds, a work of poetry and praise, singing of the heightened daily joys that come from a true comradeship between species.” (Gareth Evans, Film curator Whitechapel Gallery, London).

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SYNOPSIS:
Taşkafa is a feature length documentary essay about memory and the most necessary forms of belonging, both to a place and to history, through a search for the role played in the city by Istanbul’s street dogs and their relationship to its human populations. Through this exploration, the film opens a window on the contested relationships between power and the public, community and categorisation (in location and identity), and the ongoing struggle / resistance against a single way of seeing and being.

Despite several major attempts by Istanbul's rulers, politicians and planners over the last 400 years to erase them, the city’s street dogs have persisted thanks to an enduring alliance with widespread civilian communities, which recognize and defend their right to co-exist.

Taşkafa gathers the voices of diverse Istanbul residents, shopkeepers, and street-based workers, all of whom display a striking commitment to the wellbeing and future of the city’s canine population (a community of street dogs - and cats - free of formal ownership but fed and cared for by numerous individuals). From the rapidly gentrifying city centre district of Galata to the residential islands of the Sea of Marmara and beyond, Taşkafa navigates a history of empathy with, and threats to this highly distinctive urban community.

Taşkafa is structured around readings by John Berger, from his novel King, a story of hope, dreams, love and resistance, told from the perspective of a dog belonging to a community facing disappearance, even erasure. In Taşkafa, this voice is gifted to a wider community and range of perspectives: to dogs, a city and, finally, to history.

John Berger’s text and delivery take the viewer on a journey from Karakoy to Hayirsiz’ada, the island where, in the 1800s, tens of thousands of dogs were exiled to die. Offering a collage of testimonials to the inestimable value of non-human populations to the emotional and psychological health of the city, and a striking statement of witness both to advocacy and persecution across the centuries, Taşkafa portrays - and embodies – the vibrant, collective spirit of protest and enduring solidarity with which it closes (mass demonstrations opposing current municipal proposals to expel the street animals).

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DIRECTOR STATEMENT:
I wanted to explore how public space becomes a battleground for the contested relationship between corporate making - through demolition and redevelopment of vast swathes of the city (an increasingly international process of erasure) - and the unfolding of everyday lives within this idea of what is commonly called ‘progress’, one embedded with promises of high tech security measures to keep us safe (inside gated housing complexes, shopping malls etc…).

What if, instead, we could hold onto a curious gaze, one that resists what comes - with its own pre-ordained rules and intentions - to a place? In such a location, this fixed looking would view a dishevelled street dog as abject, while our warmer attention might appreciate it as an emblem of love and endurance. To us in Europe, the fate of such animals is perhaps a reminder of the violence of modernity, where all that did not belong to its idea was banished from sight.

Taşkafa is not finally about dogs as such. It is about the way people seek, still and especially now, to belong to a larger context than themselves, one which respects other creatures and wishes them to play a significant role in their lives. The key issue is not whether we live securely, especially in its 'official' sense, but rather that we don't lose touch with the shared reality that surrounds us.