ABSTRACT
Depending on one’s perspective, the theatrical success of Kedi (Ceyda Torun, 2017) in the United States is either a surprise or a natural consequence of its crowd-pleasing subject matter. Documentaries about animals have often performed well at the box office, and 2017 saw another animal-focused documentary, Disney-released Born in China, with a profitable distribution. However, Kedi is a different kind of documentary, more elliptical in its narration and featuring interviews in Turkish, not English. Its distribution in the United States came not from a major studio but an indie distributor, Oscilloscope. Not only did Kedi’s domestic box office gross of over $2.8 million make it one of the top-performing documentaries of the year, but the film also remains Oscilloscope’s most financially successful film to date. Kedi’s in-between nature—not quite popular documentary, not quite art cinema—speaks to a broader position of many documentaries in the contemporary media landscape. This chapter will propose the distribution and stylistic category of the crossover documentary as a nonfiction counterpart to what Rosalind Galt has designated the popular art film. For the documentary, the popular art film emerges from the intersection of institutional locations that would normally seem incommensurate: documentary as a mainstay of art cinema theaters, streaming services, and the film festival circuit. Kedi’s aesthetics correlates to this industrial position discursively coded as both “art” and “docutainment.”
