Cats can act? Taiwan International Cat Film Festival celebrates felines in the movies – featuring stars like Sissi the Red Cat and Busao the Cat

Feb 14 , 2020

Are you ready for a cat film festival? Really – the Taiwan International Cat Film Festival is actually a thing. Photo: Getty Images

Taking place February 14-16, the Taiwan International Cat Film Festival celebrates movies about cats by experimental directors including Bill Morrison, Carolee Schneemann and Guli Silberstein

While the recent movie version of the stage musical Cats flopped spectacularly, there is in fact a rich history of (real) felines in cinema. Many filmmakers are known to love cats and to feature them in their work – the Roger Ebert website even bestows a Palme de Whiskers award for best feline performance at the Cannes Film Festival each year.

The Taiwan International Cat Film Festival is all about, well, cats in cinema. Photo: handout

The Taiwan International Cat Film Festival celebrates this intersection between cinema and cats, hosted this year on February 14-16 at Taipei’s TheCube Project Space. Festival organisers Yung-Hao Liu and Ming-Yu Lee, colleagues at Shih Hsin University, describe it as a celebration of “filmmakers’ gaze at cats, as well as cats’ gaze at filmmakers”.

Now in its fifth year, the programmers have welcomed works from experimental contemporary artists in film and video such as Bill Morrison, Carolee Schneemann and Guli Silberstein, as well works starring internet-famous felines like Sissi the Red Cat from Italy, Busao the Cat from Japan and Campus Cat Augsburg from Germany.

This year’s centrepieces are retrospectives of avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas and experimental film theorist Dominique Noguez, who both passed away in 2019.

This year the festival will also feature its first-ever feature-length movie, the world premiere of Sunday, 33° by Argentina-based director Jeff Zorrilla, about a young couple who “take refuge in their lover’s bubble until the outside world comes calling”. (And there are cats.)

What to expect at the Taiwan International Cat Film Festival. Photo: handout

Another world premiere is Rue du Dernier Adieu, a short film by Mark Lyken made specially for the festival. The Scottish filmmaker has cats but had not previously included them in his works – the festival organisers suggested he do so, and he shot this one while in Japan. “This is something new for him, and for us,” said Ming-Yu Lee. Yann Beauvais’ Untitled, a humorous short featuring a cat in Beirut, is another one-off premiere made especially for the festival.

And no, the screen adaptation of Cats was not considered as an entry for this year’s festival. Liu and Lee didn’t even see it. “I saw the reviews,” Lee said.