Filming Istanbul Through the Eyes of a Street Cat

To map the emotional geography of Istanbul, you have to lower your gaze—right down to the cobblestones.

Kedi is a Turkish documentary that traces the inner life of a sprawling metropolis entirely through the daily wanderings of seven street cats.

These animals are neither fully feral strays nor kept pets; they move like they own the city, slipping through apartment windows, bustling tea shops, sun-bleached docks, and narrow alleyways. Rather than relying on traditional, heavy-handed narration, director Ceyda Torun wisely lets the citizens who feed, bicker with, and quietly rely on these animals tell the story.

The cinematography is remarkably sophisticated, engineered to capture the erratic, darting rhythms of an animal navigating a dense urban maze. The filmmakers draw a brilliant visual contrast: sweeping aerial drone shots establish the vast, vertical scale of Istanbul’s rooftops, only to drop us immediately into intimate, ground-level tracking shots that lock the viewer entirely into a feline perspective.

To get fluid tracking shots at cat’s  eye level—without forcing camera operators to crouch in agony for hours on end—the crew engineered a custom rig. It allowed the operator to walk upright at a normal pace through uneven, tightly packed alleys, all while gliding the lens a mere whisper above the pavement.

Ironically, the greatest production challenge wasn’t the urban terrain. Because Istanbul’s street cats are deeply accustomed to being doted on by humans, they frequently ruined takes by “breaking character.” They would casually march right up to the cameras for a head rub, or abruptly halt a dramatic tracking sequence to groom themselves inappropriately in the middle of the frame.

Yet, despite this unruliness, not a single animal was trained or wrangled. Every fleeting glance and sudden sprint was captured through immense patience, rather than coaxing. The crew initially scouted thirty-five cats, filmed nineteen, and ultimately sculpted the footage down to just seven distinct personalities in the edit.

The word Kedi translates simply to “cat.” But to dismiss this film as feature-length internet cat content would be a mistake. It is a lyrical, unexpectedly poignant portrait of a rapidly modernizing city, reflected entirely in the eyes of its most enduring inhabitants.