Hundreds of thousands of cats roam freely in Istanbul, the capital of Turkey. It is not something new: for hundreds of years they have wandered in that area, becoming an essential part of the people who live in the city.
They are not domestic cats, but they are not wild either. They are in an intermediate, unique and exceptional space, which the director Ceyda Torun wanted to portray in her documentary: “Kedi (Cats of Istanbul)”.
It is not a subject chosen at random for the filmmaker. From a very young age, her relationship with cats marked her life. “I grew up in Istanbul until I was eleven years old and I think my childhood was much less lonely than it would have been if it weren’t for the cats,” she explains. For her, these animals build the identity of the city, which would not be the same without them.
“Every year I returned to Istanbul I saw her change and become less and less recognizable, except for the cats. They were the one constant element, becoming synonymous with the city itself and definitively embodying its spirit. This film is, in a way, a love letter to those cats and to the city.”
But why are there so many cats on the streets of Istanbul? For the Muslim majority, these animals have a kind of sacred reputation, linked on multiple occasions to stories about the Prophet Muhammad.
Unlike Europe and the US, where stray cats are captured, the communal sense of Istanbul’s residents allows stray cats to live off their care, allowing them to maintain their independence. This is the aspect that the director explains in the documentary, since she offers a new point of view to understand the culture of the city. It even seems like a new point of view to understand how we approach life.
So the director Ceyda Torun and the photographer Charlie Wuppermann traveled to Istanbul, where thanks to the collaboration of the people of the city they began to understand the depth of the subject at hand.
Together with local researchers, they collected stories and searched for people who seemed to know the cats in their neighborhood extensively; who is the alpha, who is the father of whom, which of the cats steals from the fishmonger, which one usually sneaks into the neighbors’ houses. The stories they heard made them even more excited about the making of this film and the process of documenting these unique animals in action.
“Eventually I realized that my personal stories about the cats of Istanbul were not exclusively mine,” says Torun. “Everyone who has allowed themselves to form a meaningful relationship with these creatures has come to feel life and their role in it differently. With hindsight, the extent of this profound change varies for each person, but one thing remains: the change was generated by having had the opportunity to coexist with an animal with charm, intellect and self-sufficiency.
The cameras-cat
With the firm goal of getting as close to cats as possible, the filmmakers designed and experimented with various “cat-cameras.” They followed the animals into dark alleys and deserted basements, flew drones above rooftops, and stealthily pursued them to capture cinematic visual assets like over-the-shoulder shots of cats walking the streets. They worked diligently, re-recording the same cats day after day, capturing their unique character and interaction with communities.