Cities have a peculiar order to them. What looks on its face to be a chaotic cacophony is revealed upon closer inspection to be a carefully coordinated dance. Markets are teeming with life and action, restaurants are kinetic bastions of movement and crossing the street is a dangerous proposition when traffic is at its peak. But millions of people do it every day. They manage just fine because they pay attention, carefully survey their fluid surroundings and move forward when they find an opening.
And they apparently learned this behavior from cats. In Turkish documentarian Ceyda Torun’s feature-length debut, Kedi, hundreds of thousands of felines wander the nooks and crannies of Istanbul at all hours of the day. Citizens relate to the animals as pets, friends, neighbors and sometimes as rivals for space. Usually, though, residents show respect and love for the natural world represented by the cats. Sometimes, alliances are formed, like a seaside restaurant owner’s latest “hire”: a cat that loves to hunt the mice that find their way to the dining area from the shore. Other times, viewers are treated to moments of charity for motherless kittens, with eye droppers filled with milk.
Torun’s nimble camera follows the animals into their hiding places, impossible little holes in cracked buildings’ foundations or into stacks of boxes in a textile mill’s storage room. In these intimate moments, we are allowed to see cats at their most natural, even if their environments are made by human hands. They have a place to be, and while that place may not be glamorous, and it may have seen better days, it feels like the right place for them to be in the moment; they’ll move on eventually, but they are glad for these places’ existence while they occupy those spaces.
By doing this, Torun silently makes the case for more seeming disorder in the world, for humans to give up their pursuit of perfection in their lives and their structures. Instead of tossing something in the trash the moment it begins to feel a little old, why not find a new purpose for it? Why not invest in things that are durable enough to stand for decades? Imagine all the ways something can be used. These buildings and marketplaces and fishing boats are beaten, torn, dented and have weeds growing out of their cracks, but they’re still standing and life still moves through, in and around them. They aren’t going anywhere because they’re sturdy. They’re present. And that means something. It’s comforting to know that there will be a place to go when things get bad in the world. It’s a sly and subtle call for long-term planning with a delivery mechanism made out of fuzz and lovableness.
And that lovableness gets its due. Torun grabs local bakery owners, fish sellers and more for brief glimpses into their lives, their professions and their relationships with the semi-domesticated wildlife. One woman lets “her” cat roam around her neighborhood and remarks that the orange-and-white animal has become quite the “real hunter” since giving birth to a litter of kittens a few weeks before the cameras rolled. Despite the cat’s frequent trips outside to find mice and other critters for her to dominate for her kittens’ next meal, she always returns to the same place to get some pets from her “owner.”
Others, like a man who owns a textile business, spoke about the parental emotions that find their way into his daily life when he can’t find the cat that stays at his building. “It’s not the kind of melodrama from old Turkish movies, but I do look for her,” he says. “If I don’t see her, or hear her voice, if she’s not around when I get here in the morning, I get worried and look for her. Maybe she is like a child. People miss their kids, right? I miss her.”
But he always finds her. She returns from wherever she had been hiding within his somewhat dingy looking (but wholly functional) shop. It’s a place with character for a man with character, who loves a cat with, you guessed it, character. It’s a lovely, powerful sentiment about how we can better appreciate our surroundings while we’re in them. “It would be easy to see street cats as a problem and treat them like a problem,” another woman says in voiceover toward the end of Kedi. “Whereas if we can learn to live together again, maybe we’ll solve our own problems as we try to solve theirs.”
And she’s right.
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