ceydatorun

Hi! Thank you!!! :) We shot for two months, all day, every day :) Ended up with 180 hours of footage but we knew we'd have to edit the individual cat stories first, that part was easy... The hard part that took a while was how to string those stories together, what transitions to edit together so that the over all film would be an emotional journey... There were a lot of stories we had to abandon either because we didn't get enough material or because they didn't fit into the overall theme... :(

As far as we know, they came as early as the people, sometime in the paleolithic age. I interviewed a zoologist at the Uni of Istanbul who had been given the task to catalogue the animal remains that they encountered while digging the tunnel across the Bosporus. He showed me a fossilized cat remain from 3500 years ago that had a break in his leg that indicated that a human had helped heal. Quite amazing!

During filming, the closest we came was with a kitten who had been attacked by a bigger cat but we rushed him to the vet and as far as we know, he's ok now. But of course, a lot of kittens don't make it, both because it's a dangerous city, but it's also not nature's way for all of them to survive... When I was a kid, taking care of the offspring of my street cat friend, I saw some kittens go naturally (bugs, illnesses, etc) and because of cars... It's never easy, it's always sad, but I guess it's always a part of life...

Hi! We did a research shoot the previous year where we met a lot of cats and people we knew we wanted to follow. Then, three months before we started filming, we had a team of researchers who helped us by going neighborhood by neighborhood and we ended up with leads to 35 cats which we then ended up being able to film only 19 of, and in the edit trimmed down to the 7 that's in the film.

Merhabalar! Hmmm... that's a hard question, but we saw more kittens in areas of town where there was less neutering - more in Kumkapi area (where the fishermen are in the film) and in Galata Tower area too! And there was a lot of psi-psi'ing throughout the shoot. Actually, often we didn't talk with words with even each other, started meowing and psss'ing the whole time! The decision to make this movie evolved over time, but I had felt a debt to my feline friends growing up but it was the recent internet cat obsession that allowed us to get funding and realize this dream :)