Rudi is a man in his early sixties, a crook from the bad side of town, living on minor crimes in his small world, and who’s by now managing his affairs wierily. He is feared and respected, and for this reason he doesn’t worry about Franco, a younger thug; a nobody in the criminal world, to whom he owes some money. Rudi knows everything about his small world, but what he doesn’t know, or maybe remember, is that anything you leave behind may one day catch up, grab you and crush you.
He has spent most of his life alone, by choice, a necessity due to the lifestyle he has chosen and, when the time comes for him to take care of his daughter Susanna, who’s alone and seriously ill, he is forced to face the presence of a stranger by his side and to face himself.
Susanna’s illness sucks both father and daughter into an odyssey, precariously balanced between hoping for a change for the better and the firm hand of reality, which is cruel and overwhelming. Rudi gives up his life on the streets and comes face to face with his limits, his fears, his impotence. He falls, gets up again and finally realises that his daughter is the destiny that awaits him, his mission to accomplish. But out there is his world, the world of protection rackets, debt, “jobs”and threats, the world where the only rule is the survival of the fittest. A world that Rudi has forgotten, but that has not forgotten him. Franco shows up
again on Rudi’s path. This is the variable, the unpredictable event. Franco wants his money back, Franco wants to replace Rudi in the hierarchy of the small local mafia. Rudi isn’t concerned and mocks him. He doesn’t expect things to change, Franco to become stronger and the debt to cost him more than he could ever imagine: the world he thought he ruled now rejects him.
Rudi finds himself alone, with his daughter becoming weaker and sicker day by day, and with Franco and his men on the look-out for him in order to settle their score.
Running away is out of the question, not with Susanna, not by risking her life. And anyway he can’t hide forever, not from that world which is, after all, his own, his life. He has no choice but to abandon Susanna for the second time and to face his destiny, raging like a wounded animal.
In Tutti i cani muoiono soli, a dark and violent Sardinia in winter, provides the setting for the ordeal of the merciless passing of time. Through regrets, words that go unsaid, remorse and absence it tells us about Rudi, who’s chasing what may be his last chance; and Susanna, seeing her life slip away like sand through her fingers, it tells the story of the time we lose and of fate, sometimes unforeseeable and sometimes inevitable.