The Extraordinary Lives of Istanbul's Street Cats

You’ll find them greeting foreign dignitaries at one of the city’s most famous sights, lounging on café chairs and shop displays, and lapping up attention wherever they go. They have their own Instagram account, and custom-built shelters and feeding stations on the city’s streets. Forget the Byzantines and the Ottomans: The real conquerors of Istanbul are its street cats.

“There’s a mystery, an unpredictability about both cats and Istanbul,” says Ceyda Torun, the Istanbul-born director of a new documentary film “Kedi,” which tells the stories of seven of the city’s many street cats and the people who love them. Named after the Turkish word for “cat,” the movie shows how deeply intertwined Istanbul’s felines are with the lives of the city’s residents — a relationship Torun says her research indicates goes back thousands of years.