Ceyda Torun / ‘I made a love letter to the city and the cats’

‘I made a love letter to the city and the cats’

Street cats have roamed Istanbul for centuries. As a film starring some of them opens, director Ceyda Torun explains why the likes of ‘Psycho’ and ‘Hustler’ are so at home there

Kathryn Bromwich
Sunday 18 June 2017 07.30 BST

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ilm-maker Ceyda Torun grew up in Istanbul until the age of 11 and is now based in Los Angeles. Her feature-length documentary debut Kedi (Turkish for “cat”) is about seven of the street cats that roam Istanbul. They are cared for collectively by the community in exchange for mouse catching, affection and “good energy”. Each cat has a distinct personality: Sari, “the Hustler”, is a tabby who inventively seeks out food for her kittens; Psikopat, “the Psycho”, is a fierce black and white cat with a strong sense of territory; Gamsiz, “the Player”, is a resourceful short-haired who has charmed the neighbourhood baker with his moxie.

BABELIA – INTERVIEW 

Orhan Pamuk: A love for Istanbul

Orhan Pamuk / Amor a Estambul (De otros mundos)

The Nobel-winning Turkish author’s new novel imbues everyday stories with an epic touch

JUAN CRUZ 1 OCT 2015 - 15:11 CEST

One of the author’s illustrations that accompanies his latest novel. © Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul, 1952) has written another monumental novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, which comes after The Museum of Innocence, published in 2009. With intelligent and moving meticulousness, the Turkish Nobel Prize-winner tells of 40 years in the life of a humble Istanbul street vendor. It’s a book about happiness (or the lack of it), and about time. While reading it, it’s impossible not to feel that its protagonist, Mevlut, embodies the very Istanbul he describes, and, in fact, when one travels to Istanbul and listens to its racket and rejoicing, it seems obvious that Pamuk has made any and all of these characters stand up in his fiction on these old streets. We talk in the house Pamuk lives in, in Bujukada, the beautiful island his parents would take him to from the day he was born. He still spends his summers there, writing in a peace that’s only disturbed by “the soft passing of time,” marked by the shadows the sun throws over his bare balcony. Before we talked he offered us watermelon and apricots. He looks happy, as if he’s fallen in love, and not only with literature.

Question. You say in this book that we have to believe in the novel when we are reading it. Why is it so important to believe in what you are reading?

Answer. Because literature, whether it is fantastic or realistic, works with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called suspension of disbelief. If you’re a cynical person, if you are not a sincere believer in the strength of literature, then you should avoid reading books. In the end there is a very old-fashioned side to reading novels in our age – blogs, internet, so much information and so much humanity. Why read novels? Because we believe in the power of literature. We’re not cynical or sarcastic or suspicious about it. Literature works with intentionally well-meaning readers. You say I’m going to give 10 hours to this Istanbul street vendor’s life. Then you’re not sarcastic any more. You’re with the characters and you take the writer’s work for granted. You should not take it for granted and not question it, at least at the beginning.