Kedi is an Extended Cat Video Exclusively Destined for Hardcore Cat Lovers
The documentary Kedi, which follows multiple people in Istanbul, Turkey, as they tell stories about the stray cats of Istanbul, is a dull and overrated documentary that I feel is only destined for the ones that love cats to death. I don’t own cats (or dogs), as I’m extremely allergic to them, so it was hard for me to reasonate at the sight of cats when their citizens were talking about them.
Running at 79 minutes, Kedi’s biggest problem is that the film is absolutely disjointed — it’s a “rinse and repeat” situation of people talking about a certain cat; “This cat’s name is [INSERT NAME HERE] because [INSERT SITUATION HERE] and we don’t know why [INSERT REASON HERE]” until the credits roll. There’s no legitimate goal that director Ceyda Torun wants to achieve here — just tell stories of stray cats, which might act as a nice novelty, but not as a compelling documentary.
Sure, it’s competently shot and well edited together. Some of the cat sequences are great, especially when catfights happen. They add a bit of excitment and fun to the movie, but it’s all shortlived. The camera following cats on the streets of Istanbul is a fun novelty, but it doesn’t fill a 79 minute documentary on Cats. If you easily fall over your chair once you see a CAT in 4k on your TV and ignore the repetitive commentary, maybe this movie is for you. But Kedi is such an empty, repetitive and dull documentary that I couldn’t care less about what was going on on screen and what was told by the bystanders. Maybe it’s because I’m a soulless cat lover, or that I don’t understand how importantly spiritual and importantly physical the cats are to Istanbul, or that I couldn’t give two shits about cats. Who knows? And who cares! I don’t have much to say about the movie aside from the fact that it’s 79 minutes wasted — beautiful cat imagery and cinematography is a 5 minute novelty (there are thousand cat videos on YouTube, but YouTube decided to make a feature film about CATS doing whatever they wanted), some interesting stories here and there, but the film is a cycle of repetitive stories. Once we move on, we never see the cat that they talked about again, and so on and so forth until the director becomes tired and says “Ok, I think that’s a wrap”.
Humans can certainly draw lessons from cats, but they just need to own a cat instead of watching this movie. Many information told on CATS, in a spiritual way, I knew already, so it made the film even more boring than it already was. It felt like a revision course before an exam, where you learned everything you knew again & again until it’s crammed in your head, but not in an interesting way. That’s how Kedi feels to me.
✯✯
