ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the film through lenses related to ecology, animal studies, sound studies, national cinema, and media industries. It demonstrates why a charming film about cats, which was the first feature-length film by its maker, is such a rich text to unpack and analyze. The book looks at Kedi through the lens of anthropogenically-induced climate change. It argues that the film creatively uses music to address diverse audiences at different registers. The book provides a close analysis of the soundtrack and the score in this documentary, and focuses on two specific songs that are emblematic of the film’s use of sound to bridge the cultural divide between the East and the West. It demonstrates how Kedi uses music strategically to stage a series of productive collisions between the foreign and the familiar and between sound and image.
