CatVideoFest 2020 (2020)

Directed by: Alex P. Kitten | 71 minutes | comedy

Is it their stubbornness, the fact that they don’t care about their surroundings or is it their cuddliness? The reason cats are more popular online than dogs can be guessed. And that while in the film world, dogs are the stars. The number of cat videos that can be found on YouTube can no longer be counted. Most of the cats in all those videos remain anonymous, but a number of animals grew into true internet phenomena; think Grumpy Cat, Standing Cat, Lil Bub, Colonel Meow and Maru, the Japanese cat who tries to squeeze into boxes of all shapes and sizes.

Henri, le chat noir, also has his own following. The black and white tom from Seattle reflects – in French – philosophically on life in his own web series. His owner Will Braden has discovered that there is a lot of money to be made with the cat videos, because Henri is now advertising cat food, published his first book and won the Golden Kitty Award in 2012 at the first Internet Cat Video Festival. From that moment on, Braden became involved in the event, for which he selects images, and since 2015 he has been the main driver of the CatVideoFest, with which he initially toured small and larger movie theaters first in the US, but later also abroad. Not only to make people laugh with hilarious cat videos, but also to raise money for animal welfare organizations – preferably operating locally. Because there are plenty of cats in need who could use all the help. Why not combine the useful with the pleasant?

Cinema Delicatessen also brought CatVideoFest to the Netherlands this year, where a seventy-minute collage of submitted material, animations, music videos and of course the hilarious internet videos, composed by Will Braden, can be seen in a select number of rooms. The American says he now knows how to say ‘cat’, ‘funny cat’ and ‘cat that falls’ in more than twenty languages ​​and searched the deepest depths of YouTube for unique images. Cats are ideally suited as slapstick actors, with their weird antics, sudden reactions and quirky behavior; the expression is not without reason ‘a cornered cat makes strange jumps’. The collection of images is diverse – it is not just fleeting films of cats jumping up against their own reflection or trying to get into boxes that are too small. Some fragments are more artistic or obscure than you might expect. Because it shouldn’t be the case that you can find all these fragments yourself with a few search terms; why would you even want to see ‘CatVideoFest’ (other than supporting the charity associated with it, of course)?

There is no story or common thread in it, and you don’t have to expect anything from the mostly amateurish camera work. But the very fact that Braden put thousands of hours into carefully selecting unique footage makes ‘CatVideoFest’ worth watching. Certainly for cat lovers, but let’s face it; who doesn’t enjoy (secretly or not) the hilarious antics of those quirky cats?