“It’s hard to say whether Ceyda Torun’s delightful and visually splendid Kedi is a documentary about Istanbul, with cats, or a documentary about cats that happens to be set in Istanbul… If Kedi is any sort of anthropological examination of the life of a city, it works because its vision is filtered through the lazy-looking but in fact hyper-aware eyes of our feline compatriots…

 

“The picture’s pleasures are bountiful, particularly for cat lovers…There are cats sleeping obliviously on unnervingly high-up ledges; cats padding across corrugated rusty-red roofs; cats just hanging out in doorways, their ears barely twitching as nearby humans extol their virtues… A baker goes about his daily business, creating homey-looking pastries that you’ll wish you could eat immediately, while explaining how much his store cat enriches his life and the neighbourhood.

 

“The cat recently needed medical care. ‘We all have a running tab at the vet,’ he says with a shrug. In all great cities, the magnificent intersects with the mundane – that’s what makes them not only liveable but vital. The cats of Kedi tell that story, in between naps. They know a good place when they’ve found it.” — Stephanie Zacharek, Time, USA

 

Visit nziff.co.nz to see the full schedule of films on at the 2017 New Zealand International Film Festival. 

“Impossible to resist… Kedi is almost shamelessly satisfying: a documentary about the thousands of scrappy wild cats that prowl Istanbul with insouciance.”

— Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out NY, USA