Dogs turn up in nearly every corner of human life, and this documentary goes looking for them across a dozen countries at once rather than settling on a single place or story.
What is We Don't Deserve Dogs about?
Director Matthew Salleh builds the film as a patchwork rather than a single narrative thread, moving between former child soldiers in Uganda, regulars at a small-town Scottish pub, and a dog walker working the streets of Istanbul. Each stop stands on its own, connected only by the animal at the center of the frame. The approach favors observation over commentary: people talk about their dogs, work alongside them, or simply share space with them, and the film lets those moments carry the argument rather than a narrator. Locations shift continent to continent, but the camera stays close and patient in each one, giving weight to routines that might otherwise pass unnoticed. By the end, the film has assembled a loose portrait of a bond that looks slightly different in every culture it visits, yet recognizable in all of them.
About the cast
The film has no scripted cast; it follows real people and their dogs in each location, letting their own words and routines stand in for performance.
Context & significance
Salleh shot the documentary across widely separated regions, and the production credits list contributions spanning Chile, Finland, Italy, Nepal, Pakistan, Peru, Romania, Turkey, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam. That spread is part of the film's design: rather than argue a single thesis about companionship, it lets geography do some of the work, setting a Ugandan chapter against a Scottish one against a Turkish one and trusting the viewer to notice what repeats.
Watching We Don't Deserve Dogs on Ktime
The documentary is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, and the page itself is free to read before you sign in. K-Time's interface runs in Farsi, which makes browsing and reading about titles like this one comfortable for Persian-speaking audiences even when the film itself, as here, carries no Persian dub or subtitle track.