Dir:Nuri Cihan Özdoğan | Turkish Drama 2026
Turkish crime caper Dead Dogs Don’t Bite (Ölü Köpekler Isırmaz) arrives like a punch in the teeth in the middle of a refuse site—crass, chaotic, noisy and impossible to ignore echoing the breakdown of modern society
In a squalid port city two where mountains of imported waste have become a lucrative criminal commodity, the film transforms the illegal refuse trade into the backdrop for a rough-edged gangster drama about friendship, desperation, and moral collapse.
At the centre is İsmet, a timid young man scrambling to pay for his mother’s medication. What begins as a quest for quick cash drags him into a brutal struggle over waste shipments controlled by criminal syndicates.
Alongside his lifelong friend and neighbourhood legend Dogo, Ismet is drawn into a shadow economy where imported waste is reborn as valuable “raw material” and sold onward for profit, while the people caught in its orbit are treated as expendable.
Shot with a restless, kinetic energy, the film’s handheld camerawork, gritty textures and sun-bleached industrial landscapes mirror a world poisoned from the ground up. As toxic heaps of rubbish rise on the city’s outskirts, corruption seeps through every layer of society, testing loyalties and exposing the fragile bonds of friendship under the pressures of survival, ambition and easy money.
RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2026 | IFFR PREMIERE