Dead Dogs Don’t Bite

In a world in which garbage is rebranded by criminal syndicates as “raw material” and sold to the highest bidder, mild-mannered Ismet enters a brutal gangland war. Intending to raise the cash to pay for his ailing mother’s medication, he soon sinks into moral quicksand.

Ismet, something of a nerdy, mild-mannered young man, finds himself in a situation that so often comes before a downfall: he must find a way to raise the cash to pay for his sick mother’s medication. It’s not long before he, alongside his best buddy and long-time hero Dogo, enters the fray of a brutal, take-no-prisoners battle for control over the garbage passing through the port city they live in. In this world, stinking, rat-infested international waste is rebranded by organised criminal syndicates as “raw material” for sale to the highest bidder – and is worth the heads of those who stand in the way.

As Ismet sinks deeper into the moral mire, a terrifying economy emerges, one that equates human life with garbage, and lays either of them to waste if they are deemed unprofitable. With Dead Dogs Don’t Bite, Nuri Cihan Özdoğan remixes classic tropes of the gangland war film to deliver a tense, high-stakes drama that also serves as a scathing analysis of the human cost – physical and spiritual – of contemporary values.

– Nicholas Davies

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