“One gets a little bored of seeing only humans,” says one of the interviewees in Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s film Taskafa: Stories of the Street.
Zimmerman shares this sensitivity towards the other inhabitants of cities – feral dogs, cats, pigeons, gulls and the like – and her interest in these urban animals even led her to temporarily release goats onto the Haggerston and Kingsland Estate, her home for 17 years, as part of an artistic project.
She has been documenting the ongoing, fazed demolition of the Haggerston and Kingsland Estate, where she still has a studio, but her 66 minute “very low budget” film was inspired by a visit to Istanbul, where for hundreds of years tens of thousands of feral dogs brought to the city by Turks from central Asia have lived among its human residents.