You forget Turkey's difficult politics watching this documentary by Turkish filmmaker Ceyda Torun and cinematographer Charlie Wuppermann about Istanbul's Big Romance with—cats! (What did you think "Kedi" means?) At an hour twenty-minutes, the film is somewhat longer than it might be, but as a vacation from the news cycle, perhaps not long enough. The residents of Istanbul don't "own" most of the cats that roam their streets and markets, that nest in quiet places and makeshift hideaways. But they more than tolerate them, they celebrate them. And the cats, meanwhile, act like "slumming royals," says Joe Leydon in Variety. You can see the cast here. A number of the featured felines rule the neighborhoods where they live, defending their turf against interlopers and providing benefits to the humans. "They absorb my negative energy," one man says. A waterside restaurant owner who'd had a problem with "mice" (I fear this was a euphemism) celebrated the day "this lion took up residence." She takes care of the "mice," to the comfort of the diners, I'm sure. My particular favorite was the cat who lives at a deli. She never goes inside, but paws at the window—rather insistently, it should be noted—when she wants one of the countermen to make her a snack. The filmmakers identified a number of the city's human residents whose mission seems to be to keep these felines in food. One pair of women cooks twenty pounds of chicken a day for them. (!) "All of us have tabs with all the vets," says a bakery owner, and we see a man take an injured kitten to the vet in a taxi.. In short, the film is charming. It talks about how cats are different than dogs. And it shows how caring for the cats has been helpful to people in many ways. Suitable for all ages, and especially for those who have—or wish they had—been to Istanbul and now are reluctant to go because of paragraph one above. As Leydon says, it's "splendidly graceful and quietly magical."

"Kedi" or "Nine Lives: Cats in Istanbul" is a Turkish/American co-production in the Turkish language and the probably most known work by director Ceyda Torun. This award-winning film is relatively short as it stays below the 80-minute mark. And the focus here is on cats, namely stray cats in Istanbul and I found out there are quite a lot of them. But other than that and the director's nationality I am not really sure why they picked Istanbul. Anyway, we get to see many cats and their interactions with rats, dogs each other and humans obviously. Here and there the film also uses cats to elaborate a bit on the city of Istanbul, for example in terms of women's emancipation, plans about building new houses and here and there you may also see an Erdogan reference. But it is all about the cats nonetheless. The good thing is you get to see them from start to finish and it is impossible not to find them beautiful, especially when we see mothers with kittens. The bad news is that the film loses itself at time in just displaying nothing but cats and even id they included many people with a connection to these felines, it is not always working out. So I guess it was a good decision to keep the movie this short. The stories about the cats were interesting and entertaining, but nothing really groundbreaking. I bet there are thousands of cats out there keeping rats away from restaurants for example. But I still liked the watch as a whole and I probably "only" like cats. Cannot say I love them as I never owned a cat as a pet in my life (or the other way around as some might say),so those who really love cats will maybe enjoy the hell out of this movie and consider it one of their favorite films of the year. It's a pretty simple documentary, but still charming at times too. Yes the moments when they tried to make a connection between human happiness and feline happiness are a bit random, maybe even pretentious, but just don't take the film seriously. Maybe a bit of the cat action was scripted too. Who knows. Still worth seeing. Thumbs-up from me.

If you're an animal lover, and in this particular case a cat lover, there is no doubt you will like this documentary. It's well shot and the commentary of the people helping or having cats are obviously from people that love cats. I've always been doubtful about people that don't love animals, they are people I just can't trust. It's like they said at one point in this documentary "If you don't love animals, you can't love a person either". Turkey has obviously a lot of stray cats but here it shows that they're tolerated and loved. They bring joy to people's sometimes depressing lives. Every cat has a different character, like humans, and in this documentary it is well portraited. I saw already quite a bunch of Turkish movies, with a high rating, but I actually never saw a good one, ever. So this is the first Turkish production I did like. Can't get enough of those animal documentaries.