‘Kedi’ - Review
Three years ago, I wrote about Ceyda Torun’s Kedi and about my cat Tiger, convinced I’d made peace with mortality and the fleeting nature of love. I thought putting those words on paper meant I was prepared for this moment. Tiger passed away this week, and I guess thinking about death and actually facing it are entirely different things.
Tiger adopted my family when I was ten, showing up in our backyard like he’d been planning it all along. Fifteen years of him systematically converting my family from “no pets” people to his devoted servants. Fifteen years of learning his language: the menacing paw by the couch that meant “walk time,” the 2 AM hair-licking that meant “you’re sleeping wrong,” the laptop key-attack that meant “pay attention to me, not that screen.”
When I first watched Kedi, I saw Tiger everywhere. In Sarman, the golden neighborhood boss who ruled his territory with quiet authority. The film follows seven cats as they exist and even control the spaces of the world they occupy. In Bengü, the social cat who treated every human interaction like a carefully orchestrated performance. In Gamsiz, the mischievous and smart bakery troublemaker. Torun documents something beyond individual cat personalities; Kedi is about the way these little guys weave themselves into the fundamental DNA of a place.
Duman (the cat with manners) has become fundamental to how his corner of Istanbul moves, the most important customer of the deli. The fishermen have built their entire morning routine around Aslan Parçası. The humans in Kedi participate in an ongoing negotiation about space, food, affection, and respect. The documentary lives in an urban ecosystem where wildness and civilization are in perpetual symbiosis.
This is what I understood intellectually three years ago but feel truly now: when we lose our cats, we lose a way of being in the world that they taught us. The cats of Istanbul live on in the culture of their respective neighborhoods. Tiger lives in the same way. He has become an integral part of how I move through the world.
Kedi captures how love embeds itself in routine, how caring for something changes the fundamental motions of your daily life. Tiger didn’t just live in our house; he rewrote the rules of how our house worked. Now those rules exist without him, a ghost protocol that will probably go on for years.
In Kedi, the relationship between human and cat functions as a permanent modification to how life operates. The cats become infrastructure, essential to how their humans understand home, routine, and care. That’s Tiger’s real legacy. Not just the memories, but the way he’s completely upended how I experience daily life. He’s immortalized in muscle memory, in reflexes I’ll probably never lose, in a version of myself that knows how to be needed by something small and demanding and irreplaceable.
And Tiger didn’t just teach me how to be his human! He taught me how to see myself in stories. That first viewing of Kedi (recognizing his negotiation tactics in Duman’s window pawing, his territorial confidence in Sarman’s neighborhood rounds) was the first real moment I realized the true power of a movie in helping us properly understand our lives. Without Tiger I would not be able to love film in the way that I do today. Watching Kedi when I knew him showed me that the smallest relationships can contain entire universes worth exploring in conjunction with art.
He’s the reason FilmSlop exists, the inspiration behind starting a film review site that focuses on blending personal narratives with film. Every review we post, drawing a connection between the screen and life, traces back to a Turkish documentary about street cats that made me understand my own love more clearly. He made me understand that movies are at their most powerful when they embody the human experience in ways of excavating meaning from the ordinary moments that make up a life.
So every piece I publish here is, in some way, a tribute to him. Every time I find myself in a film, and connect a story to something real and lived and true, that’s Tiger’s influence. He helped me understand how special movies can be, how they can make sense of loss and love and the weight of time passing. Maybe Tiger is dead, but he lives on in who I am and how I experience and love the world.