Colin Dayan: With Dogs at the Edge of Life

Taskafa: Stories of the Street (2013) 65 mins

Voiced by John Berger, the 2013 documentary by the Artangel Open winner Andrea Luka Zimmerman (Estate, A Reverie) is an artist’s essay film about memory, belonging, place and 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 explores power and the public, community and gentrification, and the ongoing resistance against a single way of seeing and being.

Colin Dayan is Robert Penn Warren Professor of the Humanities and professor of law at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, and Haiti, History, and the Gods. She has also written for the New York Times, London Review of Books, and Boston Review.

Her new book is With Dogs at the Edge of Life.