2021 CAT FILM FESTIVAL
Village East by Angelika
181-189 2nd Ave. at Twelfth St.
Saturday, October 16, $20, noon
www.angelikafilmcenter.com/villageeast
catfilmfestival.com
During times of strife, especially amid the tumult of social media, many of us seek solace in cat videos. There’s just something about the tricky little devils riding Roombas, squeezing into ridiculously tight spaces, sneaking up on us like ninjas, and jumping and climbing everywhere that soothes our souls. “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats,” polymath Albert Schweitzer said. Cat fanciers — and dog lovers too — can find refuge from the maelstrom on October 16 when the Cat Film Festival purrs up to Village East for its 2021 iteration on Global Cat Day, October 16. Screening at noon, the ninety-minute program features twenty-one shorts, not random cat videos but stories with narrative arcs, from the United States, Australia, Turkey, and Canada.
Among the entries in the fourth annual festival are Bob Finkelstein’s Zack the Movie, about a neglected house cat dreaming of so much more; Susku Ekim Kaya’s Will You Be My Quarantine?; Andrew Graham’s documentary Winston the Cat Who Couldn’t Pee, about a kitty with a bladder problem; Nevada Caldwell’s hard-boiled Feline Noir; MK Ghonima’s Nauticats, which takes place aboard a ship at sea; Priscilla Dean’s meow-Western Catfight at the Okay Corral; Kim Best’s The Great Escape, in which a cat is suffering from cabin fever; Andrew Volpe’s Cat Scratch Fever, in which a cat becomes a DJ; and Asali Echols’s House Cats, about a cat who is not necessarily thrilled that the human he rules is suddenly always around. As French writer Champfleury duly summed up, “A kitten is the delight of a household. All day long a comedy is played out by an incomparable actor.”