MOVIE REVIEW: Kedi

Documentary about the street cats of Istanbul and the people who love them.

This shall not be the longest review that I’ve ever submitted.Â I’m a lover of documentary films, they have the ability to open your eyes to parts of our worlds and beyond, to places and people that are living their lives in extraordinary ways.Â How humanity struggles about their own demons, how life bursts through, all different ways of life, things we cannot fathom.Â Then we have a film like Kedi which I’m assuming was an interesting topic in the mind of the film makers at the time but for some reason left me clock watching rather than wanting more.

The positives are that the camera work of the cats and the streets of Istanbul have been beautifully shot and presented.Â I cannot fault the majority of their camera work.Â The downsides are that the film itself does very little to open your eyes to anything new.Â There are glimpses of what the documentary could have been through the story of the cats.Â

What is annoying about the interviews with the people who look after the cats is that they point out the obvious characteristics of cats.Â It’s not like they are telling us that these cats are superhuman beings that play Jazz while reading War and Peace.Â It’s all very much ‘The Cats come in and sleep.’ then there is a lot ‘This cats character is a little insane.’ and so on.Â Very little new comes into the fray.

More annoying still is that although the residents point out that the regeneration of Istanbul will leave a lot of these cats with nowhere to live, there is no voice of opposition to the cats being on the streets.Â There are no council people talking about if the cats offer a menace to tourism.Â I’m sure that there are people in the city that don’t want these thousands upon thousands of cats on the streets.Â It may shock you also the food hygiene levels that you’ll see if you decide to watch this.

If I knew a person who liked cats, I’m not a cat person, this would make a great Christmas present on DVD.Â We, in our house, know a crazy cat lady and this will be bought, because buying her gift is down to me and I have other things to think about this year.Â But the question you are asking is ‘Would you pay in to see this?’ sadly the answer is no, I don’t think that I would ever decide to sit down and watch this ever again.Â That about all I have to say.

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]