ABSTRACT
This essay studies the Los Angeles-based Turkish director Ceyda Torun’s documentary, Kedi (2016), in comparison with the UK-based activist-director Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Taşkafa : Stories of the Street (2013). Both documentaries center on street animals in Istanbul—the first on cats, the second on dogs, but differ drastically in aesthetics, portrayals of street animals, and the ways they address and affect the audience. My comparative study unpacks the intricate tensions in each documentary between the soundtrack and the visual track. I argue that while both documentaries share an appeal for cross-species symbiosis, they demonstrate different approaches to issues regarding other-than-human agency and its relationship with human geopolitics. I further mobilize this comparative study to ponder the key role the documentary form plays in enabling a zooetic approach that goes beyond anthropocentrism to envision the human-non-human entanglement.
