“Everything is beautiful when you look at it with love,” says an unnamed man partway through Kedi (2016). His observation also encapsulates the overarching feeling of the film, a gentle, 79-minute-long documentary whose subject is among cinema history’s most lovable: the surfeit of stray cats that slink around the streets of Istanbul, loyal to some but ultimately beholden to no one.

Co-produced and directed by Ceyda Torun, Kedi is as exploratory as its tirelessly marauding main characters. Not in a historical sense — the most the film offers regarding the city’s unusually large, unaccounted-for feline population is that they descend from rat-hunting trade-ship cats — but in a more literal one. The movie traverses the Istanbul streets to meet several kitties and see what the handful of human constants in their lives have to say about them. Among them are a fluffy black-and-white mouser who protects a waterside restaurant from unwanted rodent intruders; a scrappy female who often viciously protects her nearly identical-looking “husband” from untrustworthy neighbors and otherwise doesn’t care about stepping on anyone else’s toes (“It’s very important to me that she never compromises her freedom,” her favorite human says); a gray-and-white, blonde-splotched cat who chills with a fancy restaurant’s al fresco diners but never begs for food. (He prefers to paw at the window as if it were a treadmill, making eye contact with the head chef, when he’d like some hunks of scratch-made cheese.) 

To know them only a few minutes is to fall in love with them. It’s not hard to understand the impulse of the fish-stand owner who goes out looking for his regularly returning feline if too much time has elapsed since she was last seen. Kedi doesn’t allow us to get to know its human figures much more beyond that: Torun is chiefly concerned with what a certain cat means to them and what we should know about a particular feline that cannot, of course, speak for themselves. Cat-loving viewers will probably, as those interviewed in Kedi wax rhapsodic about their animal friends, find new things to appreciate about their pets — ponder how meaningful it actually is on the soul to have had several years’ worth of pets and cuddles and also whether their cat, if housebound, is losing some of itself without the ability to roam. (Watching Kedi, the city feels as though it belongs to cats more than humans; one sign sternly warns people around town not to use some left-out water and cups because they’re only for the animals.) 

Kedi’s simplicity fosters its charm. The film elongates the easy pleasure of forming an instant connection with a cat that had not long ago been a stranger. But it also makes its short runtime feel a little longer than it is. You wait for it to do something out of left field, throw in a narrative curveball. Beyond a cursory mention of frustrating, habitat-undermining urban development, neither ever comes. Kedi makes a case that sometimes it’s good enough for a documentary to function as a film-length appreciation of something and little more. Istanbul gets to experience its cat-related loveliness — which one person considers an integral part of the city’s soul — daily. Kedi lets the rest of the world get in on it.