Kedi (2016)

Directed by Ceyda Torun; produced by Ceyda Torun and Charlie Wuppermann

Cats have been an integral part of Istanbul’s population for thousands of years, long before the city was given its present name, and probably since before it was Turkish. A huge number live as ferals or, more correctly, community cats (since most seem to be friendly, or at least tolerant, of humans.) This documentary tells some of their stories through the lives of several felines, and the people who know and love them.

I did not know what to expect from Kedi, though I had heard of it, and of its glowing reviews. This is not, unfortunately, one of the latter. Despite not knowing much about the film, I was disappointed in it.

I found the trouble with Kedi was that it didn’t really succeed in its objective which, I think, was to relate how much a part of Istanbul cats are. Certainly, it told the tales of a number of the animals and their relationships with humans, some of the latter their care-givers and some merely friends or acquaintances. The stories are, by and large, interesting, but the truth is that I could imagine exactly the same stories being told of other large cities, of their cats, and of their humans. I can’t claim any knowledge on feline populations, but I suspect that London, New York, Beijing, Paris or Moscow might have served equally well for the setting. I am sure that the film-makers believed that Turkey’s biggest city had a unique perspective, but if so, it was not made clear.

The photography was excellent, and showed aspects of Istanbul probably not seen by many; the city is hardly as well known as others, despite having been the centre of the world for hundreds of years, and its fulcrum for a thousand. The cats profiled each seemed to have a different neighbourhood, a different milieu in which to live: a harbour cat, a restaurant cat, a new mother-cat, etc, but again, these could have been found anywhere. The opening text on the screen suggested that it was Istanbul and its cats that were special. What made them special was not successfully explained.

The subject of the movie may not seem to affect the review, yet I think it does. As a cat-fancier, I found it disheartening that for all the stories of the city’s cats, for all the affection many human residents clearly felt for them, there appeared to be little practical care for them. We are shown a few people who feed community cats, a mother and daughter for instance cooking chicken every day for the animals. A couple of men are shown at different times tending to the medical needs of sick kittens. But the only mention of spaying and neutering is when one cat is talked of as not being fixed. As most involved in cat-rescue know, thousands of unspayed and unneutered cats is a problem, and most of the results of that problem will die unknown and unpleasant deaths.

What Istanbul does about this problem, if anything, is ignored by the film. Indeed, since it is not even raised as a subject, it may not be seen as a problem at all, by either the film-makers or the population at large. It may have been too argumentative a view to take in the movie, it may have obscured what was meant to be a heart-warming tale; if, however, a film-maker were to document the thousands of homeless refugees chronically flooding a town which is friendly to them but largely apathetic of their needs, yet ignore how they actually survive – or don’t – his documentary would be rated incomplete. That is how I felt about Kedi.

Kedi is indeed sweet and uplifting in many places, the cats adorable and those people who love them nice to meet. But its two problems are major. Like a costume drama in which the characters are basically modern personalities in period dress, this story could have been placed anywhere; the fact that it was set in Istanbul appears more due to the director’s nationality than to the city’s uniqueness. And it does not tell the whole story of the cats; perhaps those connected with Kedi thought they had told it all. That would be sad.

I am not one who needs to be informed about the ugly side of life in every movie. If I watch a film about the building of an aristocrat’s mansion, it would be beside the point to stress that many people are going without food while wealth is spent on decoration that few will ever see. But if the film is about that same aristocrat who prides himself on being a friend of the common man, then I would expect to learn what he is doing for them. By the end of Kedi, I realised that I had been shown only half the story, however pleasant and enjoyable that half may have been.