Lots of cash goes in the kitty
The street cats of Istanbul surprise the box office with the documentary ‘Kedi.’
“Kedi,” a documentary on the legendary street cats of Istanbul and the people who care for them, has become a surprise hit, surpassing the $570,000 mark at the North American box office in its fourth weekend of release. By week’s end, it is expected to have grossed more than $680,000.
“We were heartened and excited, though not totally surprised by the film’s successful opening,” said Dan Berger, president of distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories in an email interview. “It did exceed expectations, but our expectations were pretty lofty!”
Whenever filmmaker Ceyda Torun and her cinematographer, Charlie Wuppermann, told people that they were making the documentary, they always got the same response from non-die-hard feline fanatics.
“Most people’s eyes would start glazing over the moment we said, ‘Yeah, it’s cats in Istanbul,’ ” said Torun, who spent her first 11 years in Turkey and is now based in Los Angeles.
Even people she talked to in Istanbul didn’t know if anyone would want to see an entire movie about the thousands of cats that for several centuries have shared the Turkish city with its residents and have an almost holy reputation in the country.
But “Kedi” opened Feb. 12 in New York in just one theater and was the cat’s meow among critics, scoring 96% fresh on rottentoma toes.com, and proving to be catnip to movie audiences, charming its way to an impressive $40,000 opening weekend and more than $60,000 for the first week in release.
The film opened Feb. 19 in
Los Angeles and expands to more than 100 locations nationwide this weekend.
“Kedi” had its world premiere a year ago at the !f Istanbul Independent Film Festival. After Oscilloscope acquired the film, it continued on the festival circuit and had several word-ofmouth screenings prior to release.
“We worked hard to position the film as sort of a tonic to the current mood out there,” explained Berger. “This is 80 minutes in which you can forget about the news cycle and everything else in life and just feel good.”
Though print advertising has been fairly minimal, “Kedi” has had a strong online campaign, including memes, trailers and short videos.
Torun has been thrilled about the promotion of “Kedi” because the “hardest challenge in getting the film out to the world was convincing people that there was something that they could all find significant.”
Because of her work and travel schedule, Torun doesn’t own a cat. And she didn’t have one growing up in Istanbul.
“My mom and my sister are very fussy,” she noted, laughing. “So they didn’t necessarily want an animal in the house, which is what was so great about having access to these beautiful animals.”
Every March, Torun recalled, “you’d hear the really loud and crazy screams of cats mating on the rooftops, and then later you’d hear the little tiny meows of the cats.”
It was when Torun started meeting the people who care for these cats that she realized “what was so significant about my relationship with cats in Istanbul was actually equally significant to these people.”
“How amazing that you have an experience in life that goes beyond socialeconomic confines, goes beyond age and gender, race and religious background,” Torun said. “It kind of cuts through everything and is all the more reason to explore it.”
Four years ago, Torun and Wuppermann, who together produced the film, went to Turkey to do research.
“We walked the streets of Istanbul and went to the parts of town we knew. We wanted to explore restaurant cats, market cats, cats on boats, cats in a mosque, in a church, all kind of settings.”
Before they started filming in 2014, the filmmakers had leads on 35 felines.
However, many of the cats were less than reliable in showing up, leading to incomplete stories. Torun and Wuppermann were ultimately able to film 19 and used seven in the documentary.
“We weren’t aggressive filmmakers in the sense that we weren’t trying to interview people who didn’t want to be interviewed, and we weren’t trying to pursue cats who were very obviously not wanting to be filmed,” Torun said.
And they never forced the felines to do anything.
“We were very considerate of them,” she said. “If they didn’t do the action, they just didn’t do it and we didn’t capture it.”
And Torun also got in some snuggle time with her furry stars.
“I did not hold back from petting them,” she said, laughing. “There were times when a cat would be on a staircase and I would sit next to it and pet it a little bit and then slowly move out of frame. You’d be surprised how comfortable they were with the camera.”