Hot on the tail of the street cats of Istanbul
YOU don’t need to be a cat-lover to enjoy Kedi, an engrossing documentary about the multitude of street cats living in Istanbul. But I should think that at least eight out of ten of those who see it won’t need any persuading that cats really are remarkable creatures.
The title of Ceyda Torun’s film means feline, and it springs from her conviction that cats are no less integral to the mighty Turkish city’s identity than the Bosphorus and the Blue Mosque. ‘Without the cat,’ she says, ‘Istanbul would lose part of its soul.’
Torun has made a memorable film. She follows the lives and loves of several street cats, and doesn’t have to strain too hard to anthropomorphise them. One is ‘the neighbourhood psychopath’ and responds only to ‘tough love’. Another revels in human contact and ‘nearly passes out’ with pleasure when it is petted.
But this is a portrait, too, of a city and a society. One woman, an artist, says that it is difficult to express femininity in modern Turkey. She envies cats and their sureness of what they are.
OKJA, a Netflix film, is also about the animal kingdom, but from a very different perspective. Tilda Swinton plays the boss of a U.S. food conglomerate, which has genetically engineered 26 ‘super-piglets’ that grow to the size of hippos. This is partly in an effort to solve the world’s food shortages, but mostly to make loads of money.
The piglets are dispatched around the world, and one winds up in rural South Korea. There, the young girl, Mija, who has raised it and called it Okja cannot bear to be parted from her beloved pet when the corporation suits, led by a cartoonish Jake Gyllenhaal, come to whisk it off to New York.
So Mija, in league with Paul Dano’s radical animal rights activist and his gang, plots to save Okja. Like the creature itself, Bong Joon-Ho’s film is a strange hybrid — part sharp satire at the expense not only of the U.S. food industry, but also animal-rights crazies, and part cutesy Disney-style flick. But it’s stylishly and appealingly done.