"Kedi" is not a documentary about house cats or the stray cats we occasionally see on our city streets. "Kedi" is a film about the hundreds of thousands of cats that have roamed freely in the metropolis of Istanbul for thousands of years, becoming part of the lives of its inhabitants, impacting them in ways that only an animal living between "wild" and domesticated can. In Istanbul, cats are a mirror of ourselves.
"There is a mystery, an uncertainty that both cats and Istanbul share," says Ceyda Torun, a native of the city and director of the documentary, which tells the stories of seven of the many cats in this metropolis and the people who love them. In Turkish, "kedi" means "cat," and the film shows how deeply intertwined felines are with the lives of the city's residents.
Cat: Symbol of a culture
The cat could be considered one of the symbols of Ottoman culture and is the favorite animal of the Turks. According to historical sources, Ottoman sultans already adored the felines that lived in their palace gardens, and many houses were built with cat doors, and numerous mosques had built-in aviaries.
A zoologist at Istanbul University showed Torun the skeleton of a cat that dates back 3,500 years. It was discovered during the construction of the Marmaray undersea railway system. "It was unearthed right on the shore of the Bosphorus Strait and has a healed bone in one paw," Torun says. "The zoologist's professional opinion was that the bone would only have healed that way if a person had wrapped it."
Kedi: A love letter
On her website, Torun explains that her childhood in Istanbul was much less lonely than it would have been without the feline presence. The cats were her friends and confidantes, and she misses them in every city she has lived in: "This film, in many ways, is a love letter to those cats and to the city, which are changing unpredictably.
We invite you to watch the trailer for this wonderful documentary, which we guarantee you will love. We hope to see it soon in our country.