Alle Hunde sterben

The determination, clarity, hardness, and confidence in Cemile Sahin's tone is striking. In nine episodes, Cemile Sahin tells the stories of nine people who find their exile in a high-rise building in western Turkey. They have all experienced torture, violence, and abduction by units of the Turkish army and police. Among them: a mother who loads her dead son onto a pickup truck; a man who lays his sleeping daughter in the bushes before setting his house on fire; a woman who is kept chained in a doghouse. As they recount their escape, they are haunted by the systematic terror of the Turkish military. "All Dogs Die" is a chronicle of a country marked by militarism and nationalism — told with determination, clarity, and fury. Crimes, violence, and torture need a language. And here, they speak. Reality in this country only functions through violence, says Cemile Sahin. Does it help to make the violence representable? No, she says; yet she tries anyway. And hardly anyone has done it more accurately.