Kedi

If you are a cat person, you need to watch Ceyda Torun’s amiable documentary Kedi as soon as humanly possible. This point cannot be stressed strongly enough. Part God-mode Cats of Instagram story stream, part sly travelogue of modern-day Istanbul, Kedi follows about a dozen different street cats (the city teems with homeless felines) and the lives that they have touched. The cats range from heroic mousers to therapeutic companions to polite gourmands, and slowly Kedi forms into a portrait of an ancient city in transition (we gets intimations of gentrification and modernization, while one cat is pointedly framed in front of anti-Erdogan graffiti). Although not exactly ambitious or envelope-pushing in terms of style and narrative, Kedi is an absolutely delightful film experience, fluffy and humanist, with an off-the-charts adorable quotient. The film runs only 80 minutes, but I could have watched a version at least three times as long. D.B.