Here is a sweet-natured documentary from Turkish film-maker Ceyda Torun celebrating the street cats of Istanbul, who are assigned different names, characteristics etc. (“Kedi” is Turkish for cat.)
It is by turns intriguing, amusing and a little bit twee. I enjoyed it, but at 79 minutes it feels like a marvellous 20-minute piece that has been overextended, and for me cat-worship-overload kicks in quickly, like reading more than a few syllables of TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
Istanbul is full of wild felines that look like sleek, well-fed, well-groomed creatures for the most part. The city’s residents think of them as spiritually indispensable, like ravens in the Tower of London. One says that being friends with a cat is like knowing an alien. We get some great closeups of cat faces that are indeed eerie, like extraterrestrial forms of intelligence that aren’t especially friendly.
One stallholder opines sagely that people who can’t love animals can’t love humans – probably true, although Torun immediately cuts to a shot of a cat hunting a bird, indicating that the cats themselves have no such sentimental feelings.
